


Things That Never Happened

by rvst



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-01 01:18:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 100
Words: 51,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5186744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rvst/pseuds/rvst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of short drabbles about the OT3 and the pairings that breaks down into.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

They brought the surly one in first. Her dark hair reeking of cigarettes and cheap wine, the men interrogating her wanting to have her arrested for general misbehaviour, and weren’t shy with their leering over her leather pants and see-through shirt. The chief made them turn her loose after a solid hour on the phone with her Mother, smug in the satisfaction that the woman dole out more lasting punishment than the weight of the entire criminal justice system.

The tall one, with the easy smile and the quick fists, she was next.

The leering stopped fast. Knuckles still bare and bleeding, she sat calm and without the anxiety rolling off her in waves like her maybe co-conspirator. They tried to ask questions. She answered them without flinching, even as blood dripped from her hands to the table.

“We done here?” Three hours and that’s all she had to say at the end of it, towering over the men with guns who were supposed to intimidate her.

Claiming an accident with a brick wall to explain away the condition her hands were in, and no evidence to place her there exactly, meant they couldn’t prove what her movement and demeanour screamed.

‘I killed a guy, and you can’t do anything about it’, she whispered to each and every one of them on her way out. Their anger caused them to miss what she didn’t say next, ‘and Mother dearest has been around for too long by half’.

The boisterous little girl that reminded them of their daughters, if the girls took any interest in their father’s work that is. Volunteered months ago, before the body that had them bringing in teenagers dropped and the station went into full alarm. ‘This doesn’t happen here’, she almost said, but only needed to look at them all with wide eyes that could never do anything worse than steal some cookies from the jar.

Ask anyone at the local paper, male victim, killed by another man of comparable size. Silly high blood-alcohol level and blunt force trauma done with a baseball bat found at the scene, moderate violence, murder of opportunity.

Two officers on desk duty were summarily fired in the small hours of the morning, emails linking them to the leaking of the presumed murder weapon and possible mis-handling of evidence rumours chasing them out the door.

The next night, all the blood at the first scene was the victim’s, not belonging to a track star who may or may not be abusive to those around her. Leather pants and dark eyes were seen at a party miles away, stretching the laws of time and space to pin it on her. Voices outside the station demanding to know what they were doing about the body, no not that body.

The other one.

The one with a missing son and a daughter who filed for emancipation and moved to an ancient apartment with the girl with money but no family.

Extreme aggression. Near-unidentifiable. Serial killing? Wildly improbable coincidence?

Information leaked, weeks passed, a little girl graduates from high school and disappears.

An empty apartment with blood on the walls and half-drunk bottles of wine all that remained.


	2. Chapter 2

Laura passed out almost as soon as she curled up in the back seat. Danny could just see the top of her head in the rear view mirror. For once Laura didn’t argue about being sent to the back, leaving Danny to drive and Carmilla to pass out all of ten minutes into their journey.

Danny would kill Kirsch when she tortured the chemical, drug, or whatever he had laced the provided blood with, or maybe she’d get some more and force feed it to him. Drunk vampire girlfriend was considerably harder to wrangle into a car than drunk tiny human girlfriend.

Laura couldn’t poof somewhere else and struggled to out-muscle Danny on a good day.

Keeping her eyes on the road, Danny took one hand off the wheel to loosen the neck-tie currently strangling her very gently. The vest she was forced to wear was squished her chest unpleasantly as well, and Danny was going to murder Kirsch. Slowly.

Of course she couldn’t remove either item of clothing entirely. Danny would have a mutiny on her hands if they didn’t get a chance to play with her Best Woman outfit at least once. After they were done napping, naturally.

As the drive home stretched out from half an hour to an hour and a half, Danny’s fancy suit slowly but surely came apart. The tie hung limp around her neck, the knot nothing but a distant memory. Her supposedly fully tailored vest completely unbuttoned and wide open. The first three buttons of her surprisingly still white dress shirt undone.

Danny would notice in the morning that there was a bright red set of lips stained onto the collar of her shirt, she wouldn’t have the presence of mind to be annoyed at the fact until late afternoon.

Laura stirred closer to three in the morning than four, and regarded the odd angle her neck was bent at as if it had personally killed a puppy in front of her. Then she turned her ire to the streetlights flickering as they flashed by. Turning her bleary eyes to the other occupants of the car, she saw Danny’s arm reaching across the divide in the front so her fingers could run through Carmilla’s hair.

“Nearly there?” Laura asked through the daze of waking up. Danny didn’t startle, thankfully, and met Laura’s eyes in the rear view mirror.

“Another ten, maybe,” answered Danny, removing her arm from the back of Carmilla’s seat and doing something with her clothes that Laura couldn’t see. “Could you mind this for me?”

Laura stared, dumbfounded, at the silky strip of cloth wrapped around Danny’s offered hand. She took it, hand burning from where her skin connected with Danny’s. Carmilla could seduction eyes for weeks, and Laura could laze around the house with nothing by a tank-top and short shorts covering her, yet when Danny Lawrence decided sex was going to happen in the near future:

Laura held the tie at both ends, pulling it taut with a snap, then met Danny’s eyes again. Danny’s arm moved until her hand was wrapped firmly around the back of Carmilla’s neck.

Then it was anything but boring.

 


	3. Chapter 3

There was a problem with the swim team, of that much Laura was sure.

The track team might have been involved as well, but she was uncertain on that point. Perhaps Danny was there for Laura or the general good of the school rather than to support her jock friends. That made more sense. She doesn’t call for Danny to come anymore, they were trying reasonable boundaries.

Laura’s heart remembered that with a stabbing pulse. Then another, and another.

Her chest hurt, and the rhythmic pressure being forced onto it wasn’t helping matters.

The cold of the swimming pool surrounded Laura, like she was plunged headfirst into an icy lake. The needles of frozen water pricked her skin and she could almost feel the blood running out of her veins in a thousand tiny pinpoints.

Was Carm on the swim team? That would explain why her and Danny fought like it was going out of style. Which it totally was, Laura gave herself another three outburst from either of them before she ordered them away from each other for a week. She didn’t know how she knew they would bend to her will, just that they would, and she would relish in the surge of power.

But the swim team!

What was it about the swim team she had to remember? Either they were mermaids set to drown any man who crossed the threshold to their domain or they were sirens singing to any who had sailed the seven seas, also to drown them for daring to tame the wild, unbidden will of the seas.

Laura remembered being even tinier than she was now, a smile all teeth and her father’s hat drooping down over her eyes. She clearly saw the view from on her mother’s shoulders as the big, scary boat came to take Admiral Hollis away. He would be given emergency leave to return a month later, though Laura’s tired brain refused to supply a reason why.

Danny probably took offence to people being drowned of her own accord, no way she’d be there for Laura, not anymore.

“Don’t break her fucking ribs, Lawrence!”

Laura’s ribs did hurt, good point there Carm. Inside her ribs hurt more though, a burning she hadn’t ever experienced before. Immediately she assumed her heart was finally tearing itself in two over the women who sounded like they were hovering over Laura’s head.

Proactive as ever, that was her dependable heart. Goes running off after the tall drink of hot, all the while wishing it could stay home with the dark and brooding cool.

That’s why her chest was frozen and burning at the same time. Well done, Laura!

“She’s breathing, and her heart’s going, chill Karnstein.”

Carmilla didn’t breath, silly Danny.

Having her eyes closed got boring as Carmilla huffed and she could hear the hackles rising to the threat a Lit TA clearly posed to a big scary vampire.

They were knelt on either side of her, water dripping from them both as they glared.

“Did we get ‘em?”

Their attention snapped to her, and her heart tore itself in two all over again.

Please, throw her to the sirens, Laura might not have to choose if she was dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please feel free to add any prompts you might want written in the comments.


	4. Chapter 4

Over the last five years, Carmilla Karnstein had walked in on all manner of weirdness in their modest home. While Danny hid her strangeness a little better, there was no accounting for the enthusiasm Laura brought to absolutely everything she became enamoured with. The fact that her little affairs with hobbies and skills seemed to be selected at random did not help matters. Carmilla also knew that if Laura got an idea in her head, then Danny would be recruited quickly and without much of a fight.

Being routinely outnumbered was just part of life for Carmilla, and it generally kept her on her toes.

Coming home to their living room furniture pushed and piled up against one wall and the overhead lighting switched off wasn’t the most promising start. The two of them passed out against the pile of furniture, less so.

“If I keep looking at you, then I won’t see whatever damage you’ve done to the house and I won’t have a headache today,” Carmilla rationalised with her partners, wishing that she didn’t catch sight of Danny’s laptop glowing on the floor in the middle of the room. She followed the cable plugged into the side of the device up to one of their barstools that had a projector siting on top. “Movie night, okay, that’s not too bad.”

Everything would have been fine, no one would nearly have a heart attack, and Carmilla wouldn’t have to cry when she really hated it, if only she hadn’t looked at the wall they were using as a screen.

The yelp of surprise that escaped her lips startled Danny into consciousness, which in turn woke Laura, her little heart obviously racing at being woken up so suddenly. Laura looked around the room wildly, panicking until Danny automatically mumbled some comforting words while playing with her hair.

Danny did this without opening her eyes once, a skill Carmilla would be jealous of like usual if there wasn’t a whole flock of birds painted onto the wall of her living room. Laura calmed down as Carmilla tried not to wonder over how familiar the birds looked.

“Do you like it?” Laura asked, eyes all big and awaiting a treat for a job well done. Carmilla forced her feet into action and inspected them closer, noting that they seemed to be painted onto the wall in precise lines. “You said you wanted them framed, but didn’t want to like, nail into the wall.”

Danny grunted out something that might have been mistaken for an agreement to Laura’s general sentiment. Carmilla smiled and knew exactly how much of the furniture removal Laura did.

Carmilla retrieved her sketchbook from where it was lying next to Danny’s laptop, all too aware of the eager eyes locked on for her reaction. Danny groped blindly to pull Laura back to her side, the smaller woman falling backwards with a squeak. The birds on the wall were exact copies of her own sketches from their yearly zoo trip, tripled in size, and arranged to look like a flock in flight.

“I’m not moving the furniture back,” was the only reply she got before Danny groaned in a needy manner and Carmilla had to join the sleepy pile on the floor.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Silly concept is silly.

Danny Lawrence did not 'do' Halloween.

She didn't like the mass indulgences in chocolate and sugars. She rankled at the piles and piles of sexy costumes available to women. She even bristled at the constant stream of children coming to the door begging for treats with a carton of eggs ready if she refused to go along with the tradition.

The fact that Danny Lawrence did not like Halloween was deemed immediately to be a fault in her upbringing somewhere. This was determined by one Laura Hollis, who then decided this needed fixing as soon as humanly possible.

Danny didn't notice when her two girlfriends' weren't at their shared off-campus apartment one afternoon, presuming that they were either out getting 'supplies' or off having one of their many adventures in being mean to cafe owners if they supplied sub-standard hot chocolates and black coffees. The fact that it was the last day in October completely slipped her mind, not even warranting a second thought even after two whole years with both Laura and Carmilla.

Danny dragged herself into bed for a nap before they inevitably woke her to make them something edible for dinner. Well, Laura would want something edible, Carmilla was generally content to latch onto Danny's neck like her life depended on it, and it occasionally did.

A full hour was all the Goddess decreed she was allowed, then she woke in a haze to suspicious whispering at the end of their bed. She considered not opening her eyes, life was so much quieter when she didn't open her eyes when there was conspiratorial whispering happening nearby.

"She's going to strangle us both in our sleep," came the disgruntled grumbling of Danny's usual partner against all of Laura's enthusiasm. Danny wondered if Laura had successfully convinced the vampire to go to the campus Halloween party as Dracula, though this would be Laura's third year running failing to get that particular plan off the ground.

"She's going to love it, if for nothing else than we aren't exactly covered up here," argued Laura, getting Danny's attention immediately. Cracking an eye open, Danny's vision was met with blinding glowing white in one half of her field of view and a bright red in the other. "Good evening, Ms Lawrence."

Danny opened her eyes fully and sat bolt upright in bed. The amount of skin on display was more than worth being interrupted from her nap.

Laura had an artfully tattered white dress clinging to her body and stopping well short of a decent length for covering her legs. Carmilla was wrapped up in one of her tightest corsets yet with leather pants so close to her skin that were she alive, Danny would be concerned about her blood flow. Danny dragged her eyes away from their bodies to look them in their smirking faces.

Oh. Danny raised both eyebrows as Laura's angel wings and Carmilla's devil horns came into her view.

"Why hello there, you should get to screwing you girlfriends' right now, none of this decency crap," Carmilla purred. Laura looked more than a little affronted.

"How dare you suggest such a lewd activity, Danny, you should take them to church and marry them instead," Laura argued. Danny caught on.

"Really?"

"You don't actually have to do anything, we will hang off your shoulders and advocate for our own sides," Laura begged. An angel on one arm and a devil on the other sounded worth braving the Silas Halloween Bash.

Danny sighed, and resigned herself to being arm candy for her Halloween-happy girlfriends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompts maybe?


	6. Chapter 6

Carmilla knows she’s the only one left awake and somewhat alert.

She know it, but pokes at Danny in the driver’s seat while groaning out Laura’s voice. Her shorter wife was asleep in the back, napping away their latest tangle with the supernatural. Danny insisted that she was fine to drive, and Carmilla believed her. She behaved as well as any human could have, there wasn’t anything she could have done.

Carmilla felt the water seep into her heavy boots. Rushing and freezing cold, the scent of salt invaded the car, offending Carmilla’s keen olfactory sense to her core. Urgency slammed into her chest as the front windshield cracked under the rising pressure of the water, adding to the damage done by the short fall, the sudden stop.

She tested her arm muscles, figuring that she could out-pressure some silly water if need be. The real dilemma smacked her in the face as she zeroed in of the blood dripping from Danny’s nose and the grinding of broken bones met her ears from Laura’s hand.

Carmilla watched the water rise past Danny’s feet, travelling up her legs with no sign of consciousness from the woman. Carmilla felt the water, if it wasn’t waking her up then there was nothing the vampire could do that would work.

“Laura!” Carmilla yelled, panic pitching her voice upwards. She couldn’t find the will to care. “Hollis, I need you to wake the fuck up, and fucking fast!”

Danny didn’t so much as flinch while Laura used her in pain and/or annoyed to show she was amenable to the idea of being awake.

Ripping her seatbelt cleanly away from its buckle, Carmilla flung herself between the front seats. Laura had her uninjured hand over her eyes while her legs were thankfully not bent at the awkward angles Carmilla was expecting. Danny still only moved to breathe. Carmilla pulled Laura’s hand away from her eyes and sighed in relief as Laura blinked twice, then registered the darkness surrounding them for what it was.

“Carm, Danny?” Laura’s eyes flicked around wildly, taking in the cracked windshield, the rising water, and especially her immobile wife. Carmilla shook her head, and nimbly returned to her own seat. “Fuck.”

“Can you swim with your hand?” Carmilla asked, wanting to keep Laura focused. “Because I can’t drag both of you out.”

Laura closed her hand into a fist, whining at the stabbing bone-deep agony that it caused. She set her jaw in that determined way Carmilla couldn’t seem to replicate. “Yes, you worry about Danny.”

Getting a better look, Danny had blood pouring out of a long gash across her forehead along with her bloody nose. Carmilla tore her seatbelt to shreds and braced herself against Danny’s arm. Laura brought her hands to curl around both headrests, ready to follow her wives’ out of the sinking car.

The water rose while Carmilla decided which of the two doors to open.

Climbing on top of Danny, Carmilla braced her legs against the floor and pressed both palms to the heavy door.

Then she forced it open.


	7. Chapter 7

The room is dark and humid.

Carmilla can’t see her own hand in front of her face, and she can barely breathe. The silence that only comes with the dead of night is booming throughout the room and whatever building she’s in. Her head diverts her attention from her surroundings to the feeling of being hit by a truck that her body is singing insistently. The pain overwhelms her senses, together with the oppressive dark and the close heat and her world gets impossibly darker.

The sense of time passing become irrelevant. With no light or sound to gauge days or routines, all she has is the length of time it takes for her body to demand sleep. Carmilla has been forced into sleep seven times when she hears a sign of life outside of the darkness. She wonders if she has died, and this is Hell, or at least Purgatory. The noise is an explosion muffled by layers upon layers of concrete. The room is made entirely of the stuff, and it’s sealed tight, like she was thrown into a hole to rot. There’s no way out, and her strength is failing to conquer the walls or floor.

Nothing follows the explosion, and it’s another three bouts of fitful, nightmare-filled sleep before another sounds. The second explosion much bigger, much closer than the first. Logically, she knows she’s starving and alone, but there are spiders crawling over her skin and dust constantly falling on her head, the particles bonded with live-giving blood. She faints not long after the second explosion.

When she wakes there’s noise aplenty, and all of it close.

The dust previously imagined was really raining down, she felt it, breathed it, and revelled in the concept of change, of something new.

The explosions cut off abruptly, and in the new quiet she can hear voices and footsteps and metal grinding and clashing against metal. In the midst of the plethora of noise a much closer rhythmic hammering starts up. She crawls over to the side of the room the noise seems to be originating, unable to stand even if her life depended on it. The hammering continues, sending dust and tiny chips of concrete blast into her face, the pain in her eyes a welcome respite from her shattered hands.

Then there’s light.

Carmilla throws an arm over her eyes, screaming at the lancing brightness stabbing into them. Voices apologise, familiar voices. She can’t see, even when she tries, it’s too bright, too much light to fast.

More concrete crumbles.

Then she smells it: blood. Fresh blood, nice warm nourishment.

“Throw him in!” Carmilla knows that voice, and uses the last of her strength to stop herself lunging and drinking from that voice. The voice notices her effort, “Danny, quick!”

Grunting, the scraping of steel against concrete, a male shout followed by a dull thump.

“One blood-bag, as ordered,” another familiar voice crows, tired and relieved all at once.

Carmilla surges. She bites. She drinks.

A heart stops pumping and there is silence again.


	8. Chapter 8

“France?”

“Absolutely not,” Danny replied immediately to Carmilla’s question, stunning the vampire. She raised an eyebrow in question while Laura messed around with the supernatural travel guide she found in the Library. “French women scare me.”

Now Laura rolled her desk chair back to stare at Danny. Danny, who squirmed under their combined attentions, remained resolutely silent until the page loading on her laptop distracted Laura. “Greece? All those gods and heroes, bound to be something interesting there,” she declared, though she took on the same uncertain slump in her shoulders as Danny. “That might be a bit out of our league, maybe next year.”

“All manner of beastie roaming there, giants, chimera, harpies, and strange ancient vampires,” Carmilla tried to sell literally any decision at this point. Deciding where to go for a week-long break should not take three hours. Laura huffed while Danny threw herself back onto the bed, clutching at her side as she shook with laughter.

“You’re a strange ancient vampire,” grumbled Laura. “Danny, pick somewhere,” she whined. Danny took close to a full minute to get over her bout of giggles. “Danny!”

“Antarctica?” Both of her girlfriends’ suddenly seemed to be questioning Danny’s sanity. “What?”

“Cupcake gets cold in summer, Summer!” Carmilla almost yelled. “Do you want her to freeze to death?”

“Hey!” Laura crossed her arms and pouted at Carmilla while shivering at the mere thought of going somewhere quite so cold. “The book and the Internet both agree that Italy is a worse idea than Greece, so that’s out.”

Carmilla nodded along with Laura’s words, “much more violent.” That got Danny’s attention. “Which isn’t a selling point, so don’t even bother.”

“Switzerland, they’re not violent,” Laura said while she flipped through the book that was organised by number of co-existing deities, something none of them wanted to think about too hard. “Cheese, chocolate, and fantastic time-pieces.”

“I don’t know how comfortable I am being near CERN, that many watches, and the Collider all at once,” Danny said just loud enough for them both to hear her. “Belgium? All the chocolate, none of the physics breaking my brain.”

Laura took a breath in, book turned to the ‘ridiculous god activity’ end, and started to speak.

“Suggest Egypt and I swear to all the gods in that book that we will be going to Siberia,” Carmilla growled, glaring holes into the guide. Laura snapped it closed and tossed it away before Carmilla remembered she could set things on fire. “England or England-adjacent?”

Silence. Laura glanced ruefully at her book. Danny sat perplexed by the suggestion until ‘Calais’ and ‘Dover’ sprung to mind, causing her to frown but not quite enough to turn her against the idea. Carmilla considered her own words for more than the time it took to say them.

It must have shown on her face. “What?” Laura asked, “werewolves? Rival vampires? Stonehenge is a time machine and/or portal to different dimensions?”

“Dragons?” Danny added, fingers inching towards her battle-axe.

“No,” Carmilla shook her head, “rain.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *self-indulgent giggling*


	9. Chapter 9

Watching Danny coach their kid to athletic glory was supposed to involve sunshine and a picnic blanket she could stretch out on. Carmilla was deeply displeased that not only was the sky overcast with horrible clouds, but Laura had abandoned her for flirting with the weekend track team coach. Very uncool, Carmilla thought as she stared up into the offending bleakness of the clouds.

What was the point in being outside if it wasn’t even going to be a nice day?

The starter guns for each race kept Carmilla awake, startling her out of her pleasant drifting to pay attention to her lonely state. She could hear Danny not paying a single ounce of attention to her charges, and she could also hear Laura blatantly encouraging that kind of behaviour. Frowning, she caught wind of a cluster of fathers there cheering on their sons, and they all only had sons competing, in between rounds of speculating about the attractiveness of the ‘hot coach’ versus the ‘sexy single mother’.

The second moniker had Carmilla propping herself up on her elbows, curious as to how the pack came to that particular conclusion. Nope, Danny and Laura still had their smitten faces on, disgustingly cute as she found them, and Danny was leaning so far over the fence separating the field from the spectator area the she was likely to fall over it sooner rather than later. It wasn’t like Laura wore a ring or anything like that, and Carmilla supposed she was the one to deal with basically everything at the kid’s school due to Danny’s fairly inflexible work hours and Carmilla’s even less flexible sleeping hours.

Therefore, Carmilla concluded that the men ogling her humans with unabashed glee were fathers from the school rather than the munchkins’ sports friend’s parents. Tragically, this also meant that they would have to change schools to avoid the men, instead of swapping athletics teams which was so much simpler.

She was far enough away from them that she could use her powers to set their overly-gelled hairstyles on fire, and literally only Laura and Danny would even think that she was responsible. That would satisfy both her boredom and her protective instincts all at once and would give them a great story to tell if the kid brought someone home.

Idly taking a sip from her ‘berry smoothie’, Carmilla focused on the lead asshole’s blonde hair, and grinned triumphantly as he checked the sky for a sudden bout of sunshine to account for the heat blasting the top of his head.

“Carmilla, stop it,” Danny growled for all appearances at Laura, choosing to use the vampire hearing as a long distance communication device.

Weighing the costs and benefits, Carmilla sighed and flopped back down onto the blanket, crossing her arms and wishing she had fallen for a less observant pair of women. Though, wasn’t Danny paying her complete attention to Laura?

Carmilla sat back up to catch her partners’ leaning of either side of the fence, staring at her with clear bedroom eyes. Laura waved teasingly as the pack of fathers grumbled to themselves about the ‘mega-hot soft-punk aunt’.

She couldn’t stop herself, and three of them went home with considerably less hair than they started with.


	10. Chapter 10

Danny could take it.

The searing pain rushed through her arms as the spikes went in and her head snapped to the side as a fist connected solidly. The healing itches of yesterday’s fun were suddenly the last thing on her mind. Not that she could think anything in particular, her mind was wild and delirious. Her body knew it had to fight, so her mind was allowed the respite.

The villagers were just scared, she reminded herself when there was a break in proceedings. Their fear wasn’t their fault, and Danny had all but volunteered for this reconnaissance mission. Not quite totally though, she only stepped in when it looked like they were going to maybe choose Laura, she was on her feet and out the door to meet the mob before even Carmilla could react. The vampire did her part and restrained Laura and Perry from following her, from stopping her.

Jawbone sufficiently cracked, Danny heard it go in her one good ear, the overly large farmer-type started in on her nose. It was already bleeding and he clearly wanted to add some broken bone to the equation. Fantastic. Danny braced herself to roll with the blow.

The spikes in the flesh of her arms were a restraining method more that part of the effort to make her give up the information they wanted. Danny thought they had a promising career in highly effective prisoner containment engineering once they were done giving in to mob mentality.

Thanks in part to Laura’s videos being leaked to the world at large, they wanted someone to ‘teach’ them. The crowds of Styrian farmers, carpenters, and blacksmiths would not rest or disperse until they knew how to kill the ‘vampire menace’. Laura’s videos clearly told them that both Lola Perry and Danny Lawrence had first-hand experience dispatching the undead while they took a leap in logic to conclude that there was no way Carmilla hadn’t given Laura a way to defend herself against Carmilla’s own kind.

They said they would burn the building and everyone in it if anyone but their chosen three came out, or if they stayed inside, or if it looked like they were ‘planning something’, or if-

They had many conditions on the agreement.

Carmilla’s plan to break each and every last leg she could get her hands on was not met with enthusiasm.

Danny watched LaFontaine make the same cold calculations she was, and locked on to Carmilla at the same time. The vampire noticed their set jaws before Laura or Perry, and understood:

Danny was the expendable one.

LaFontaine talked Perry into stress baking while Carmilla made a dramatic show of begging Laura not to leave her, even managing some startlingly real tears. Perry was the only one to notice that they continued for hours after Danny used the two distractions to slip out. Carmilla and Laura would just have to field that interesting set of questions on their own.

Danny spat a clump of blood into her captor’s eyes, laughing as he squawked in alarm.

Danny could take it.


	11. Chapter 11

The fire wasn’t Laura’s fault.

The dog actively chasing the cat around the yard, the child covered in brightly coloured food dye, and the broken frying pan were her fault. The fire was totally Danny’s responsibility.

Laura got home first, precocious ten year old son in tow, and decided that she was going to make one of the three different meals she could prepare in an edible manner. Carmilla was off dealing with her truly ridiculous family while Danny wasn’t going to be home for another three weeks. Laura felt fairly secure in the knowledge that only the kid would know if she failed, and take-out was nearby and plentiful if the worst happened.

The animals went wrong first.

Laura had no good guesses as to how the dog got inside, but she was inclined to blame the kid or the cat. Laura left the beef strips she had spent nearly twenty minutes cutting out in the open air. This attracted the cat, who only stole one piece. The evil thing then decided to parade the catch in front of the easily jealous dog and off they went through the open sliding glass door to play keep-away over less than a mouthful of meat.

The food colouring was less possibly-the-cat and more totally-Laura.

He had to bake and decorate some cookies for his class in a exchange of culture via foods often consumed at home. A week ago, Laura had the pleasure of being glared at over Skype by a not-impressed Danny Lawrence. The letter home did say that he was the only one who sounded completely honest about both liking his choice and the frequency it was consumed.

In retrospect, she shouldn’t have let the ten year old be in charge of squeezing the bottle. The splash back was spectacular. After the first one, he wanted nothing more than to ‘accidentally’ do it again. Laura let it slide, more mess wouldn’t make cleaning any harder.

The frying pan.

In her defence, house policy stated that any form of teleportation was done at your own risk and if you get a frying pan bent and partially shattered on your head, then it really wasn’t the wielder’s fault. Carmilla chose the worst possible moment to ‘poof’ home and Laura swung blindly with all her might. Carmilla let out a long string of curses in no less than seven languages that the kid would no doubt repeat tomorrow at school and Laura would have to go talk to his teacher. Again.

Wife soothed, pets settles, and child off to probably scrub the top few layers of skin off, Laura started to heat the oil she was going to cook the stir-fry in over their nice, shiny gas stove.

Danny was not a subtle person, in any sense of the word. Tall, bright hair, brighter smile, and downright boisterous when excited. Laura could dedicate the rest of her life figuring out how her wife managed to sneak up behind her.

Danny’s hands on her waist led to Laura turning to probably break their other frying pan, and then the oil was in the fire.

Totally mostly not her fault, right?


	12. Chapter 12

Danny chopping wood for entirely practical reasons was immediately turned into a spectator sport.

Laura was the main drive behind the stopping of all other activity to watch Danny’s whipcord muscles stretch and curl over and over again as she swung her axe. Carmilla only joined in because all sounds but the rushing of a distant river and the occasional crack of wood on wood went silent. Laura made noise no matter what she was doing normally, so the vampire just had to investigate the sudden lack of Hollis-related racket.

Upon finding Laura basically hanging out one of the open windows in the front room, Carmilla rolled her eyes and went to get the sickeningly sweet lemonade Laura was overly eager to make and a glass.

“You know,” Laura hit the back of her neck on the bottom of the raised window when Carmilla spoke directly behind her, “you’re going to dehydrate yourself if you keep drooling like that.”

Laura pulled herself back in the window, rubbing the wounded area and praising Carmilla internally that she waited until the inevitable reaction would be drowned out by Danny’s latest swing.

“Some people would be jealous if they found their girlfriend panting over another woman,” Carmilla said conversationally, causing the expected blush to rise over Laura’s cheeks. “Especially since we agreed we weren’t going to say anything while she can’t exactly escape if we freak her the fuck out?”

Carmilla’s voiced raised into a question that sought to remind Laura of their little plan. After spending a weekend in closer quarters with Xena, they would figure a way to bring the complicated ideas they had surrounding all six feet of Danny Lawrence and their love lives to fruition. Namely, they needed more of her in theirs.

“I know, that would be totally unfair and that’s why we invited Perry and LaFontaine along too but they aren’t here yet and does she have to do that all out in the open and have you noticed her arms?”

Carmilla poured her excitable girlfriend a big glass of sugar featuring a hint of lemons to add a sugar high to Laura’s near fever pitch of swirling hormones. She knew her girlfriend well enough by now to know all noble intentions were going out the still-open window the moment Danny set foot in the spacious cabin. Carmilla even gave Perry a slip of paper containing the exact wrong turn to take that would force their car to a different cabin, the detour costing enough time that setting out again would be unwise. Carmilla might have booked both cabins and taped the other key somewhere obvious.

Laura gulped happily at the liquid sugar as Carmilla noted the lack of noise coming from outside. Then she heard the axe being leaned against the bottom of the front stairs and the telling creaks of the wooden front porch.

Laura slammed down the glass just as the screen door opened. She turned to be faced with Danny Lawrence wiping her forehead with the bottom of her white tank top.

Carmilla watched any and all restraint Laura might have had fly out the window.


	13. Chapter 13

The morning is quiet, birds have learnt not to come near the house on the hill.

The locals are scared and the sightings of big cats where they shouldn’t be have more than quadrupled since the three mysterious women moved in. The population is largely elderly, so there is a distinct lack of Internet use that would reveal their new neighbours to be so much better and so much worse than their collective imaginations could picture.

Carmilla took her warmed mug of blood out to sit on their front steps, sipping contentedly as she listened in on the early morning in the village. She would turn in to sleep sooner rather than later, but the sunrise and the morning’s gossip was too delicious to pass up.

She could hear them whisper and plan and plot, and took a break from her fact-finding mission to lie back and relish in the sounds her wives were making as they faced the morning with two vastly different levels of enthusiasm. Laura overly happy about a new day starting with new challenges to face. Danny wanting to sleep until noon because there was a really long book and she couldn’t sleep until she finished it.

Eventually Laura would bother Danny enough that the older woman reluctantly rolled out of bed. There would be an unholy thump from their bedroom and that is when Carmilla would deign to grace them with her presence.

Until that opportune moment, there was an exciting scandal rippling through the village. Someone had posited over the morning rush to buy the local newspaper that the women in the house on the hill weren’t siblings or cousins as many locals had presumed. The proprietor of the corner shop was telling everyone that would listen that there was a bigamist encampment in their humble community. Carmilla choked on her ambitious mouthful of blood, partially out of shock, but mostly due to the flush of rage that flowed easily through her body.

Moments after she stopped actually inhaling the blood, Carmilla was outside the shop and letting the blood drip from her lips as she nearly gave the oldest resident of the village a heart attack. One of the young ladies appearing in a literal puff of smoke was the toughest challenge her heart had ever had to stand up to.

“First of all, we are not married,” Carmilla growled, locking eyes with each elderly individual that she was a couple centuries older than. “Second, there is no evil stepmother or weird ass pimp situation going on.”

The woman who suggested they were under the thrall of some kind of supernatural Don Juan had the decency to blush.

“Finally, you will all shut the fuck up, or your sudden tourism boost thanks to the ‘mysterious big black cat’ will stop immediately,” she threatened loudly and with careful enunciation for those with hearing-aids and other hearing related issues.

They stared at her in silence. Carmilla sighed, ruining her morning routine was not worth the crap she would get if she actually hurt any of them.

“Am I clear?”

The white-haired brigades all nodded so fast Carmilla was concerned for their arthritic necks.

In another flash of smoke she was gone.

The expected thump came just as she heard the locals wonder if they were travelling magicians.


	14. Chapter 14

It’s a particularly violent kiss that starts it.

Carmilla pressed herself on top of Danny and there was nothing Laura could do to stop them. Sitting back and watching over the top of her book was enough for now, they would tire of doing their weird wrestling foreplay thing eventually. Carmilla usually got scared of taking it too far and backed off in a hurry.

Rather than having a mature conversation about boundaries and wants and desires, Laura’s idiot girlfriend used three centuries of wisdom and knowledge to avoid the heck out of a potentially embarrassing situation. Danny could barely talk about her feelings with a straight face, Carmilla struggled with her follow-through on the seductive allure she had clearly spent all her time perfecting.

It was like the vampire didn’t notice Danny’s hands clawing at her neck, nails dragging across her skin while crushing her throat to the point of strangulation, if Carmilla needed to breathe that is. Laura wanted to sit them down in a doctor’s office to sort their strange ways of working through issues. If it got her out of asking why Danny wanted some sort of perverse revenge and Carmilla seemed to really, really like having the tables turned, Laura was willing to pay for the session out of her cookie and cocoa budget.

Laura considered it a miracle it had taken this long, for Carmilla’s bruising pace to slip and catch Danny’s lips in between two vicious sets of teeth. Even from Laura’s vantage point she could see something had gone wrong immediately. Danny didn’t even seem to notice she was bleeding, nor that she was accidentally bleeding while connected to her vampire girlfriend. Carmilla noticed, then she was gone.

Danny was left coughing through the smoke Carmilla left behind, and a dazed and mildly delirious expression on her face. She sat up, panic setting in. Laura caught sight of a single drop of blood falling from Danny’s lower lip, and wanted to do some vampire-strangling of her own.

“You either taste real good, or real bad,” Laura said into the silence. Danny didn’t know whether to glare or smile and settled on doing both, which made her look like a serial killer. Laura evidently had a type. “She ran away from me too the first time, though that was a bit more on purpose.”

“Laura?”

“Yes?” Laura replied, carefully closing her book and moving to their bedroom door to see just how far away Carmilla had gone. She found her girlfriend immediately, ripping open a blood-bag with her teeth and gorging on it.

“Why?” Danny whined as she noticed the stinging in her lip for the first time. Watching Danny attempt to manoeuvre her long limbs off their giant bed was for once outdone by Carmilla trying to get an entire meal into her mouth at once.

“That’s it. Both of you, on the couch, now!”

Carmilla finished her bag of blood, wiping her lips with guilt. Danny still seemed to have no idea what happened.

Laura wished for a moment that her girlfriends’ weren’t quite so vanilla.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fallout 4 has hit me hard along with NaNo, bigger stories take more time for me to be sure I can finish writing them.


	15. Chapter 15

Carmilla had lost three shirts, two belts, and enough money to pay her housing fees for the rest of her half-assed degree at this stupid school. It was starting to dawn on her the magnitude of the hole Laura had let her fall into.

Laura used Carmilla’s money to wine and dine Danny Lawrence in increasingly elaborate romantic gestures. It rankled the vampire to no end that she was being outdone in a test of knowing one of the women she was dating. The jury was still out as to if Danny knew they were actively gambling on her or not, but they’d decided without speaking about it that it would be better if Danny never knew.

“Red,” Laura guessed with confidence as they wandered down the path to the Summer Society’s main dormitory. They were meeting Danny for a romantic trip to their much larger bedroom. They would tell Danny about the plan when they were too far away from the Summer Society for her to turn back. Laura and Carmilla were geniuses.

“It’s a nice day, she’ll go with green because she wants to roll around in the grass all day,” argued Carmilla. “She’ll want to roll around in the grass with us and we cannot let her draw us into her weird active lifestyle.”

“No, it’ll be red because it’s been like a week and she wants us to draw her into our version of an active lifestyle,” Laura corrected her girlfriend. Carmilla stopped walking to consider the possibility. “We must pretend to resist for exactly three seconds so she thinks this whole thing was her idea. She likes that kind of thing.”

Carmilla looked at Laura like she had grown four extra arms. “That’s ridiculous. We could split the difference and say she wants to bring mild exhibitionism into the relationship.”

Laura’s face must have been a little contemplative for Carmilla’s comfort.

“Hard no there, Cupcake,” Carmilla intercepted whatever new adventure Laura’s mind was producing. “You can take that one up with Stretch if you want, with her outdoorsy green pants.”

“They’re going to be red,” Laura said automatically. “Because I am winning ‘Not Staring At Danny’s Ass In Technicolour’ thirty-six to nothing.”

Carmilla tugged so hard on Laura’s hand that it felt like it was about to dislocate. “Just because I can’t prove you two aren’t somehow cheating, doesn’t mean you aren’t.”

Laura jumped to catch up and place a kiss on her grumpy girlfriend’s cheek to soothe the sore loser buried deep down inside.

“What happens if we’re both wrong?” Laura asked to diffuse Carmilla’s unfounded suspicions. If the vampire couldn’t snoop in Danny’s drawers to see what order she had put them away in that week, then Laura wasn’t going to let her obvious advantage go unused. “The woman has a literal rainbow collection.”

“Danny wins,” Carmilla concluded after a moment’s thought.

“Danny ‘wins’ what?”

Their girlfriend had sneaked up behind them while they were busy arguing. Her overly-tight skinny jeans were blue to match the sky. Carmilla slapped her forehead while Laura smirked and leaned against the vampire suggestively.

“Danny wins whatever she wants.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am fighting the urge to write a Fallout 4 AU for the OT3. It's not working.


	16. Chapter 16

Vampires were creatures of the hunt. They chased after their meals in one way or another. Some chose the seduction route, playing the mysterious stranger of considerable wealth, charming victims into castles, carriages, and expensive cars. Others gave power to their baser urges, using superior strength and speed to chase down the most dangerous of game, some even employing the accessories of a regular human hunt to make it feel more authentic. Dogs howled into the night and the beating rhythm of charging horses were the final sounds victims heard.

Carmilla was the rare modern vampire who employed both tactics in tandem, and was all the more unique for her chosen prey.

Her willing prey.

The rumours swirling in the supernatural community in all of Europe were overblown re-tellings of the child vampire and her two little humans. The girl was barely out of infancy from their perspective and she was playing the role of rebellious youth far too well for their liking.

The former noblewoman kept one human for hunting traditionally and another for seducing into a willing haze. To the elders of her own kind it looked like keeping pets, like a domesticated pair of cows that gave milk periodically. They went to speak with her Mother and found her dead by the girl’s hands. No doubt the humans that had wormed their way in to her affections were pushing the girl into some twisted form of matricidal rage.

They sent werewolf emissaries, on the night before the full moon so they could exact an execution if need be, and they were returned with fur singed and tales of the vampire rolling around in the dark forest with a woman they initially took for one of their own due to her impressive stature. Worse still, the girl seemed to be letting the human win in some kind of twisted pandering to good will.

They sent a more mature female vampire of the girl’s particular romantic leanings to tempt the other human away, giving the girl a reason to ask too much of the warrior, effectively ending their relationship dead, literally.

The woman took well over a month to return. She took so long that they were considering sending in some kind of reinforcements if not an full-scale siege of the damn school.

The elders were immediately concerned for the continued existence of the school as a physical structure. The vampire came back limping with parts of her flesh burned clean off to the bone. She wouldn’t speak of what happened beyond confirming that it was fire rather than acid that left her partially skinless.

They collectively decided to swear off going anywhere near that particular area of the Styrian lands. There was no way they were exposing themselves to a school apparently filled with arsonists and people who willingly entered into a mutually beneficial relationship with the local baby vampire.

Over five decades later, their records were investigated when the question of returning to the region was brought back up.

A sheet of fine parchment was discovered buried deep in the overflowing piles of vampire birth records.

It read:

‘Able to shift into large feline creature, instantaneous transportation, mild pyrokinesis’.


	17. Chapter 17

Last chance to run, a small, scared voice said from the depths of her mind. Run away, leave now, they’ll be fine without you, it reasoned as it spread dark spores of uncertainty throughout herself.

Danny’s legs wouldn’t remain still. They bounced in a jitter without her permission. Her hands ran through her hair with increasingly violent intensity. The weight on her chest was only growing heavier as breathing became a laborious effort. Pressure boxed in around her ears, turning the sounds of the hallway into a high-pitched whine. The demon voice was technically right, if she was going to leave, it would have to be damn soon.

Carmilla had to know she’d arrived, had to know that instead of walking into the damn room, Danny had collapsed into one of the waiting chairs in reception. The man behind the reception desk was eyeing her with polite contempt. Danny knew he’d seen scores of people get this far and then turn away. She wondered if they were all a nervous wreck, or if they stared at the brightly coloured door like it held their graves rather than a ticking bomb like Danny did.

She didn’t know what he was concerned about, Laura and Carmilla had crossed the room and gone through the door, two was generally accepted to be enough. Danny was surplus. Her legs stilled and she stopped breathing as a lump rose in her throat. Pressure welled and demanded tears to fall. Breathing became impossible.

Run now, you’re surplus, unneeded, the damn voice shouted in the same whisper curling through her spine.

The man was openly hostile in his staring now. Maybe people started to hyperventilate before they ran, usually. He would know better than her. It sat unpleasantly in her chest that it generally wasn’t women sitting in her position. Danny watched men run from unlucky Summer girls, broken rubber and random lapses in medications sending them to hospitals with chairs almost like this one. Danny let her head fall back against the glass window behind her and let the man continue with his increasingly accusing stare.

Her mind wandered to a kid no older than ten with half their teeth missing due to a truly worrying level of sugar consumption, a different kid with a somewhat obsessive interest in the stars, then another with damn scurvy because any form of vitamin C was banned from the house. Danny squeezed her eyes closed against the images, willing them to disappear. They were both capable women who could raise a half-decent kid on their own.

There was a very deliberate thump against the colourful door, getting the attention of both Danny and the rightfully judgemental man. Danny smiled, heavy boots sounded distinctive no matter what surface they were kicked against.

Deep breath. Stand up. Ignore man.

Danny glared at the door like it was the gates of Hell and her idiot vampire had gotten herself damned.

Being needed was entirely overrated.

Being wanted, on the other hand?

Who in their right mind would pass that up?


	18. Chapter 18

For his senior year, Wilson Kirsch decided that the annual mock war between the Zetas and the Summer Society wasn’t a thing that he was on board with. The face that Danny Lawrence had personally ‘killed’ him and a full quarter of his brothers on her own since they were gangling freshmen still not totally comfortable with their heights. He would have to prove his physical superiority over the damn woman somehow.

He spent a full three days trying to find some sport that he was better at then her. It had to exist and it had to be a one-on-one sport. She’d basically kill him at baseball and he was most likely better at football. Basketball is what the hamster wheel he used as his brain threw against the wall, sticking like done spaghetti.

Were he a bit brighter, he would have been suspicious of how quickly Danny accepted his terms.

They’d played a few pick up games, but a person’s performance at four in the morning nearly blind drunk should not be used as an indicator of sober daylight skills. For example, they had talked each other into believing that you scored by throwing the ball through the hoop upward rather than downward. It rebounded quickly and Kirsch had to help Danny and her injured neck to the med centre. The vampire hottie was so far beyond not pleased that Kirsch wondered if he was going to go out murdered by a babe in leather pants. That was how he wanted to die, so he was cool with it.

Initially, he loved how many girls had turned out to watch them play, even though it wasn’t the usual fare of violence and mayhem. The fight would still rage at the end of semester, they just didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. Halfway through the game, he noticed two things:

One, he was losing, badly. Somehow.

Two, far more alarmingly, the vampire hottie was glaring at him like he personally killed her Mother. He very much remembered her doing that. Was tiny hottie frowning at the entire rest of the crowd?

Their vague rules of ‘whoever gets a decent lead and/or whoever is winning when we get bored’ were nearly at the point of giving Danny the victory when she said as quietly as possible, “when I score next, you need to run and run fast or they will kill you for this.”

Kirsch missed his shot and dared to look at where the girlfriends were, confirming that they were indeed alternately glaring at the crowd of drooling women and him. Kirsch was struck by a lightning bolt of brilliance and decided that very few crowd members were there for him.

“Can you distract them?” Kirsch didn’t even care that his voice squeaked in a highly undignified manner. Danny shot from way out and greeted her victory with a sombre grin. “Please?”

The crowd didn’t go wild, which probably saved his life. “I can try,” she said before throwing her arms up, declaring herself the winner and letting the wave of people do most of the work covering his escape.

He spent the rest of his college career in the Zeta house, vampires and journalists were mean when they got all jealous.


	19. Chapter 19

Laura wasn’t hearing things. There was just a really insistent ghost haunting their basement.

It was hitting on her and Laura knew she wasn’t that narcissistic. Her new wife didn’t so much dismiss her mentioning the ghost as blush a brilliant shade of red and escape the house like it was on fire. Danny was generally a brave woman, as most fire-fighters tend to be, and Laura was the only person who got to witness her more skittish side.

“How do you let her leave ever?” Laura shivered as the ghost hummed into her ear, the seductive voice sending her senses into overdrive. “That is one spectacular view, did I see a picture of her next to a fire engine? You are unreasonably lucky, Sugar.”

“It’s so much better without clothes,” she agreed with the disembodied voice. Laura shook herself to chase the voices she was hearing from her mind. Then she reminded herself that she really needed to make an appointment with a medical professional as soon as possible. “And you don’t exist, so why am I answering?”

The ghost that didn’t exist took this poorly. Laura felt a hand curl around her neck from behind, the weight of a body pressing against her back gave excellent evidence both for and against her mental state being as stable as ever. “But I’ve been so lonely up here in this big, scary house,” the voice pleaded somehow sarcastically, “I needed company and the universe sent me two gorgeous women to live with, it must be my birthday.”

Laura’s eyes fluttered closed, pretending the hand at her neck was real and abruptly remembering that she was newly married. Twisting away from the ghost’s possibly solid form, Laura started to toy with her golden wedding band to remind herself of her commitment. The door flying open reminded her much more efficiently.

“Is the, uh, ghost hitting on you too?” Danny demanded as she stormed back into their admittedly old and haunt-able house. “Because I barely slept last night and it was very uncomfortable.”

The ghost scoffed. “Uncomfortable? You insult me, Red.”

Laura choked on her own saliva as Danny blushed again and shifted her weight from one leg to the other. “What does the whole ‘monogamy’ thing say about ghosts?”

“If I am not alive, do I really count as a person in the law’s eyes? Is justice not blind?”

Danny hid a grin behind her hand while Laura set her mind to ‘solving a mystery’ mode. “Theatre actress?”

“Poet, or philosopher,” Danny rebutted quickly to the indignant cries of the ghost. “Oh, I am so right.”

“I am a Countess thank you very much you-”

“Horrible, terrible, unwashed masses?” Danny cut the ghost off, her eyes dancing with competitive glee. The invisible hand was back around Laura’s neck and Danny took one of her annoyingly long strides to grab her hips. “I say we roll with it.”

Laura shrugged, if they were both hearing the same voice, and no one told the lawyers, why not make nice with the friendly ghost?


	20. Chapter 20

Carmilla can’t stop herself from racing out of their very lovely home. The urge to drink something warm and flowing is overwhelming. Getting away from her of so fragile humans is the only option. Three times in less than an hour she found herself staring at a tantalising jugular vein, desire so loud that she asked Laura to repeat the same sentence more than five times. Her speed nearly broke their ornate front door and then she was in the middle of the woods with life and living blood surrounding her with a warm embrace.

Rabbits, deer, and the odd farm animal long escaped were mapped out in her hunter’s mind. The urges wanted to pinball her way around to each and every one of them, to drink every drop from the beasts then move on to the next victim.

Rationality tried to break through the blood lust, what would Laura and Danny think if they knew she was planning a carte blanche slaughter of bunnies and Bambi?

Danny would at least recognise that she needed to hunt, to fight for her food. Laura’s bottom lip would jut out and her eyes would water as Carmilla had to admit she’d gone off to kill a Disney movie full of fluffy creatures. A brief moment of control lit up in her mind, aiming for one big creature to kill and eat rather than ten smaller ones. The teasing she would face if she came home blood-drunk would be unbearable and it would continue for days.

Fear tickled at the back of her neck, she’d overlooked something. Something that was now charging through the woods in pursuit of a predator invading her land. It was her conscious mind rather than the overpowering instincts burning through her body that realised that she herself was the competing hunter invading another’s territory. Competition for fluffy creatures was about to get more violent than it had been for many years.

It was a bear, that much she could tell as she jumped to a low hanging branch to get a better lay of the battlefield. Carmilla didn’t especially care what kind of bear, they were all slow and weak compared to her awesome power. The low hum of hunger urged her to be cocky about her own abilities, and drove her to remain low hanging fruit despite the threat.

The bear stopped near her, taking her time to stare at the vampire caught up a tree with a dull confusion, surveying the threat with interest so casual, Carmilla wondered if it was some kind of godly aspect of the local deities. No one at home would be pleased if she got into a fight with another demi-god and then didn’t come home. Danny would be insufferably smug as she had to carry Carmilla’s body back to Laura, again.

Carmilla let the bear move first, powerful muscles exploding toward dinner without so much as a growl. She crouched on her branch, locking eyes with the charging beast, smirking at her coming victory.

Then the brutal hunt began.


	21. Chapter 21

By consensus, no one asked anyone else where the tiny black kitten had come from. They decided it was better left unanswered, the infighting would be fierce if the answer wasn’t sufficient.

Laura knew it was Danny, with her big heart and weakness to tiny, adorable creatures. They had an entire relationship built on this weakness, so Laura didn’t think about it anymore. She enjoyed the kitten for what it was, and often carried it around on her shoulder with its tiny claws digging tiny holes into her shirt. Laura could handle having two cats in the house.

Danny figured it was Carmilla secretly getting pregnant and then giving birth to a little vampire kitten. Somewhat more seriously, she strongly suspected Laura’s need to save everything and everyone had flared up during the weekend of Halloween when the kitten had first shown up. It was a well-known fact that black cats didn’t have the best time during this time of the year and Danny agreed that the little ball of fuzz didn’t deserve whatever the neighbourhood kids had on their minds.

Carmilla spent the night the kitten appeared over-eating blood and getting herself soundly drunk. While Danny and Laura had exactly no self control when it came to cute things, especially feline cute things, Carmilla couldn’t exactly rule herself out as the culprit. The kitten latched to her like she was its mother, mewling pathetically whenever it was awake and Carmilla wasn’t in close proximity. Laura pouted over this and Danny nearly broke a rib laughing the first time it happened.

The kitten just wanted somewhere warm to sleep.

The big red one had a special pocket behind her neck that was perfect both for its comfort and the warmth her body radiated. The kitten had wormed its way in when the pocket was left undefended in a park while the red one was training for future hunting. As far as the kitten could tell, red one wasn’t quite ready to attempt hunting on her own and she resolved to bring her new family something to eat as none of them seemed interested in the many birds and rats around their home.

The pocket got her into the moving monster where the kitten lay in wait for the excellent perch one to grab an inferior pocket the kitten had found herself in, with a metal set of teeth that the vantage point one snapped closed with the kitten inside. The metal teeth opened an eternity later and the kitten met Mama.

Mama was the one who smelled right, like the kitten did. Well, almost like her, close enough. Mama was warm at night, and she knew just how to hunt all kinds of big things. The kitten didn’t know what a deer was, but she knew Mama could hunt it down faster than the kitten thought was possible.

They didn’t solve the mystery of where the kitten came from, and that was okay.

There was a long argument when dead birds and rats started appearing randomly around the house.

The kitten had no idea what they were talking about.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NaNoWriMo is nearly over and I can't wait to write something different.

When they’re still at Silas buying flowers is strictly banned. There was no telling what sort of weird and dangerous side-effects would result from it, and they weren’t exactly keen on them in the first place. Therefore, no flowers.

After leaving Silas and moving into the top floor of a duplex, they keep potted plants on their windowsills. They aren’t flowers, but various herbs that either make the rooms smell great or can be picked easily to add to whatever culinary adventure they were subjecting themselves to on any given night. The moratorium on buying flowers was relaxed to ‘only if they are fake flowers’ and promptly the urge to buy them went away entirely.

Five years went by, and they bought a house that was previously a very small farm.

A gardening war immediately began.

Carmilla’s grasp of the wonders of modern technology was surprising for a woman who was older than their heritage-protected house. The vampire didn’t tend to their suddenly plentiful lawns. Carmilla compared nineteen different companies and selected three of them to work on their three different types of grass. They were sport-ready for Danny and her ridiculous need to run and other such insane activities as well as Laura’s extensive kite-flying hobby.

Laura’s work did not keep her as busy as both Carmilla and Danny thought it would.

Danny used her concrete regular hours to be the practical, sensible, boring one in the relationship. The woman spent eight hours per day being on call for rushing headfirst into burning buildings and she liked something simple to do with her downtime. Basic vegetables and a massively expanded version of their herb garden that fought the locals and their hesitance with both their relationship and the rumour running around town that Danny was obviously a werewolf. Free stuff tended to made even the strangest neighbours a joy in the community.

Laura didn’t agree with the community pressure to keep their grass brightly green and constantly trimmed. She puffed up to maximum rage when it got to her ears that someone in town had a problem with her partners. From an academic perspective, she wanted to yell at the freaking villagers that Danny was entirely too human to be a werewolf and have they noticed that her other lover is a damn vampire?

The anger even extended to the time Danny spent in the yard wearing almost nothing and messing around in the sun and the dirt. Laura did not like her girlfriend to be that attractive in public when Laura couldn’t take full advantage of the situation. Also, the vegetables offended her in general.

If Carmilla could spend more money than their youth suggested they had keeping the local standard for grass care and Danny could uselessly sweat and groan and shine, then Laura could waste her time as well.

After spending three weeks designing her garden beds in The Sims, she gave months of her time to creating a lavish, attention-heavy, brightly coloured flower-based garden on their front lawn.

Danny and Carmilla jointly decided that Laura needed a different hobby after the nineteenth bouquet of flowers they received after the first month.


	23. Chapter 23

The pirates in the sky were surprisingly hospitable, once you got them in private and away from judgemental eyes.

Soaring above the clouds, Carmilla Karnstein and her wayward fallen star were treated to the captain without a shirt on as she danced around consider what to wear that day. The captain was statuesque and stunned both Carmilla and the fallen star, Laura, into silence. Captain Lawrence did not have such a hindrance.

“The pursuit is of larger importance than your romantic squabbles, though I do apologise for the inconvenience,” she said over her shoulder while considering a black shirt or a billowing white stereotype. Captain Lawrence decided she was going full stereotypical pirate and pulled the white shirt on. “Good or no?”

Laura babbled incoherently for the entire time Carmilla could only hear the beginnings of tinnitus in her ears. Captain Lawrence’s cheeks dusted with a light blush as she shifted nervously underneath the dual mutual appreciation of her unconscious show.

“The pursuit, Captain?” Laura ventured, her face screwing up in that adorable confusion that left both her captor and the stunning woman struck dumb for long enough for even the star to notice. “We have to be back in Carmilla’s village sooner rather than later if my presence is to be a gift to her dearly beloved.”

Captain Lawrence stared at her as if she has spoken gibberish. “I would very much like to meet your beloved,” she said with wondrous disbelief, “and we are on the hunt for the witch that turned my First Mate into a pig.”

“I thought that was dinner,” Carmilla mentioned, glaring at the Captain who seemed to have a problem with Ell despite never meeting the marvellous girl.

“Have you and,” she paused until Carmilla grumbled out her love’s name, “ah yes, you and Ell been together for a while now, I presume this is some kind of marriage proposal?”

Carmilla flushed a brilliant red while Laura hid a grin behind her hand. The star recovered from their uncomfortable shifting first. “I am the price the girl has set for Carmilla to even begin courting her. One fallen star, hand delivered within a week.”

Captain Lawrence watched Carmilla consider the final goal of her quest, frowning as she looked over to the star and then back to the Captain herself. “Or not?”

Carmilla let out a deep breath and cradled her head in her hands.

“A moment if you would,” she begged of Laura, charming smile and a low bow sending the star blushing out of the cabin. Carmilla’s despondency was immediate and obvious. “Do you know what stars do when they’re happy and content?”

Dark eyes regarded her warily. Captain Lawrence was unsure as to which of her passengers she wanted, and resolved to take the matter up with the crew later. “No, what?”

“We’re trading with your village, and you’re the Mayor’s apprentice sent to experience the world while gaining useful skills, with your betrothed of course,” she declared instead of answering. “Tonight, we start with proper courtly dance.”

“Why?”

Captain Lawrence shrugged, “so you can see what stars do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How was everyone's NaNoWriMo? I barely got through half of the next long We Three Idiots story. I'll dive into the Western AU and the Fallout 4 AU starting tomorrow.


	24. Chapter 24

The ball was beautiful, twirling partners and brightly lit faces smiling well into the night. Mircalla had no desire to join them, rather enjoying her wine in peace with eyes trained on the swirling colours of the ladies’ gowns. She would play it off with mother as admiration or jealousy, like she always did. It wasn’t the worst night of her life.

Then Mother arrived and the night plummeted to bottom three worst nights of her life.

The grand jumble of her name began and she continued through her second life with a renewed confidence. If she was already an abomination by Mother’s hand, then the open appreciation of the ladies around her couldn’t have damned her further. Death was the best thing to happen to her.

The rain hammered down onto the underside of the small, practical car. Carmilla heard every drop, the rhythmic beating against metal willing her to sleep. That would be nice, maybe if she ate first though.

The scent of blood flooded her senses, driving her stomach wild with want. It was near and it was fresh, from a still-beating heart. The blood resembled a fine wine to her hunger. Her head pounded right along with her aching neck and spine.

Carmilla fought to open her eyes, coming face-to-face with a intricately patterned bottom of a tyre. Vision focusing into clarity, her foggy mind made out that it was the front tyre of a sports motorcycle. A pale hand lay next to it, the remnants of a leather glove beside it and a tantalising throb of an active heartbeat bouncing against the wrist. Carmilla’s mouth watered at the sight of fresh food. It wasn’t the familiarity of.

Of.

She pressed her hands against the roof of the overturned car, pushing herself up and forcing her way through the pain in her neck to look at the person who was driving when the car was right way up.

Laura’s blood was always tempting. Carmilla’s roommate, who she was not halfway in love with, tended to injure herself at least once per week and the restraint Carmilla had shown over the months deserved a medal. Now it was freely dripping to pool so close to her mouth. It was even more delightful up close, despite how it was flowing ever slower.

Carmilla’s brain caught up to her situation and panic set in.

While her death signalled the real start to her life, to the life she enjoyed and didn’t want to leave by any means necessary, Carmilla knew Laura would end her painfully if Carmilla did to her what Mother had done to Carmilla.

The woman on the motorcycle who Carmilla and Laura had been mutually appreciating before the truck would be fine.

Laura needed someone to do something and fast. Carmilla wished she had taken Mother up on her offer of a university education, something in the medical department. Then she could do something.

The woman on the motorcycle woke from her forced sleep and swore.

Carmilla held on to Laura’s blood-spattered hand, and wished for a miracle.


	25. Chapter 25

Laura didn’t set out to be an Empress.

It wasn’t her fault the resurrected Dean decided that the best way to get her wayward daughter was to kill the two most important people in her life. They were dead for a full day before the Dean revived them with some kind of chanting Laura couldn’t be bothered learning. Turning Laura into a vampire didn’t change the situation much but Danny Lawrence wanted to go toe-to-toe with vampires when she was a fragile human, giving her fangs and super strength and speed was the dumbest move in vampire history.

The Dean did not live long after they woke up from their brief eternal sleep. Carmilla didn’t even have time to start grieving for her lovers’ before they were back home with Mother’s head dropped at their door like a dead bird delivered via cat.

Carmilla stared at them, gaze flicking from Danny’s blood-lust and Laura’s calm consideration of the potentially unending nature of her future. None of them saw the light of day for three days. People got worried.

Carmilla had to physically restrain Danny from attacking LaFontaine and Perry when they eventually came knocking after little Laura Hollis. Laura calmed Danny down with a kiss, to Carmilla’s admiring awe. Carmilla was sent to face them with a look from Laura. The vampire allure settled on her like it was made for her and her alone. Danny took to the rage monster inside, her body cracking and shifting as it tried to settle into an animal better suited to the fury churning inside.

Mother’s presence and power was immediately missed, curious envoys arriving from all over the world to check on the situation in Styria.

Carmilla was sheltered from that part of her own world by the Dean. Laura took to it with an authority that turned three of the nine vampires that arrived within a month. The other’s were summarily lured to their deaths by Carmilla, dealt a quick end by Danny.

Laura refused to pay tribute to anyone but herself, be it another clan or a dumb fish god thing.

The dead messengers were followed by armies. Carmilla would sit at Laura’s side until the end of time and this way she got to hunt with impunity among those that a vampire Laura Hollis declared to be expendable. Silas quickly became a crime-free zone, under the threat of becoming vampire food.

Turned vampires were aristocrats generally. Some ancient branch of the nepotism, class discriminatory tree that guaranteed a race of seductive spoilt brats.

Danny was a warrior, with bruised knuckles and literal bear claws. Carmilla dropped her dog jokes for ursine humour and they waded through the dead of their own kind under orders from their girlfriend.

Carmilla wanted to travel, so Laura decided they were Napoleon-ing Europe without a weakness to the cold of a Russian winter.

It wasn’t what she had in mind when she woke from her death, but if Carmilla and Danny wanted to crown her Empress of all Europe well:

Laura wasn’t going to argue.


	26. Chapter 26

Pants were rare on the upper level of their home.

The spiral staircase hid the landing well and no one who visited ever had reason to venture up there. Pants were deemed unreasonable once they were alone and the three of them resolved to never mention the glorious comfort they had found to anyone they knew. Their house was isolated by necessity so heavy curtains were often drawn back, letting natural light flood into the top floor throughout the day.

Freedom was new for all three of them, from family, from duty, and from the prying eyes of the world.

The pants-free zone was the first piece of ‘things we would never do before’ greatness that they tentatively tried. Next followed sleeping until noon each and every Saturday. More specific freedoms included Carmilla’s breakfast wine, Laura’s habit of leaving the bathroom after a shower with only her hair covered, and then there was Danny’s distracting reluctance to clean her damn heavy duty jeans properly.

They were clean, just not the pristine she usually strove for at Silas and at home with her family.

She left the dirt and grass worked into them in the yard. The oil and grease that generally covered her while she messed around with the old truck they bought for the purposes of Danny messing around with it’s relatively simple design.

Thus, a divide in their minds and morals appeared.

Did they want their giantess all grimy and work-worn, or was the no pants policy more important?

Danny decided for them at least one day out of the week. She collapsed onto their most comfortable armchair, slouching with an empty bottle of beer next to her and dead asleep. Laura and Carmilla took longer than they were going to admit to decide that moving their heavier blankets down to lay in front of Danny’s sleeping form was the best plan of action. Their girl had worked herself ragged all day, messing with weeds and a complicated furniture-building project that stumped both of them. They felt she deserved to sleep in peace.

Wearing pants on the top floor of their home was considered an etiquette foul, a phrase they could never repeat to Perry. Falling asleep downstairs prompted an immediate camping sleepover with pants optional and a sound check on the door locks beforehand.

Their attic was promptly abandoned to whatever creature from the pits of Hell had taken up residence in there, they were in perfect unison on that particular matter.

When Danny went to throw away her stained, frayed, and hole-ridden work jeans five years into their stretching their wings of freedom, there was Hell to pay.

Laura ran interference, keeping Danny occupied by any means necessary. If she had to use her body, then that was a sacrifice Laura was willing to make. Carmilla sneaked in when Danny’s hands, mouth, and eyes were all quite occupied and returned the jeans to the bottom of Danny’s third of the wardrobe.

Because they were adults, independent, and generally clueless.


	27. Chapter 27

Danny loved running track, her body was built for it and watching new personal bests drop felt like she was flying.

Soccer became an issue after a particularly tough match that ended with her breaking three fingers against another girl’s jaw. Basketball stopped being fun when she was teased by her high school classmates for only being good at it because of her height. That was when she stopped exclusively dating guys taller than her and started chasing skirts instead.

The height teasing was going to follow her anyway and it wasn’t like she didn’t like girls as well. Though there was one particular stereotype each and every one of her girlfriends over the years questioned.

If she was going to be that obviously not-heterosexual, why the fuck didn’t she just play softball and get it over with?

Danny just stopped dating altogether after the seventh girl in a row asked her about her choice of athletic pursuit.

Then there was a freshmen and a vampire and her life got way more complicated.

Of all things, Carmilla had an interest in the toned muscled of Danny’s legs. Laura liked her stamina. For the first time, running track was a boon to her relationship. Clearly she was going wrong by asking one girl to like all of her. Much easier to get there with two of them working together.

“Hey, Xena?” Carmilla started to speak despite having her head resting on Danny’s thigh. Danny felt she should be beyond speaking at that particular moment, but vampire ability and all that noise. Danny grunted to signal her ears were still connected to her brain. “Why do you do advanced jogging?”

Danny stretched a weak arm to yank the vampire up by her hair. Carmilla’s dark chuckling reminded her that she would never do anything in bed that the damn girl didn’t plan beforehand. “Why words?”

“Why running?”

Laura’s many, many keys bashed against the door as she let herself in. Neither of them moved.

“Running fun, bad at teams,” explained Danny, her words slurring together as Laura gasped. Carmilla raised her head long enough to smirk at her speechless girlfriend. Danny was going to freak out about the sudden interruption later, better get her fun in now.

“Offensive things to say to your bi girlfriend?” Laura ventured into the uncharted territory of Lawrence-Karnstein Post-Sex Chats.

“Explaining sporting choices inarticulately,” answered Carmilla. Danny pulled her hair again. “Words, Fido, use your words.”

“Oh! Speaking of sports, Danny can you help me with my running? I want to try out for the softball team,” Laura called over her shoulder as if walking in on the two of them was an everyday occurrence. Weekly, yes. Daily was pushing it.

“Do I have to play?” Danny moaned out as Carmilla got bored of the conversation. “Go attack Laura you damn vampire.”

Carmilla summarily ignored her and continued her important work on Danny’s neck.

“No?”

“Then I’m in, come be distracting please, I might pass out if she doesn’t stop.”

“What’s the point of the aggressive jogging if you can’t handle a day’s exercise?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See above RE: I tried so hard to write smut and I just couldn't. I tried and the words refused so have this instead.


	28. Chapter 28

Adding a kid to their already complicated living situation wasn’t something they planned. Danny spent three full weeks in self-exile because she figured it was her fault that Laura was pregnant. Carmilla argued that ‘fault’ wasn’t the best word to start out with if Laura decided she wanted to keep the kid. The variety of surgical and chemical options Danny came up with in her exile to stop it ever happening again accidentally astounded Carmilla into checking out what other sections of science had advanced without her noticing.

Laura spent the three weeks launching an investigation into her familial medical history and found nothing that worried her. She sat Carmilla and the ever-reluctant Danny at their purposefully intimate kitchen table, frowning at the furniture changes they would have to make in the near future. “I think we’ve had enough time off in our own corners. Thoughts?”

Danny didn’t seem to be able to avert her eyes from the hand Laura unconsciously kept on her middle. Carmilla took up the silence without hesitance. “I have to know if you’ll average out to equal a regular-sized kid.”

Laura kicked her under the table. “Not helping.”

“Fine then, if we keep it, then we need to move somewhere that isn’t six flights of stairs off the ground. If not, then we need to sit down and clarify our positions on this subject before we get all hasty and do something we can’t take back,” Carmilla finished with a pointed glare at Danny. The other woman barely acknowledged she’d spoken. Laura let Danny have her dazed wonderment with a side of guilt for as long as it took Carmilla to get annoyed at being ignored. All up, around seven seconds.

“Danny?”

The woman jumped so violently that she nearly fell out of her seat. “I-I’m not opposed to either option.”

“Neither of those answers were helpful, thank you oh wise elders of mine,” Laura mocked the two of them. “I want to know if you want this or not, it’s a two option, pick one or the other question.”

“I’m not deciding what you do with your body for the next nine months,” Danny answered quickly, almost as if she had used the exile time for more than self-flagellation. “I want to have kids, no matter how we have them. This can totally be a misfire or just not the right time.”

“I kind of want to move anyway now,” Carmilla also didn’t answer her damn question. “Dibs on telling the old-ass dude in 1A that my girlfriend got my other girlfriend pregnant on our last day here. Important human head spontaneous combustion research to be done.”

“Setting fire to people is not a reason to keep a kid, Carm,” Laura sighed. One day they were going to be grown up, and hopefully it was sooner rather than later. “Though not telling him who did what and making him guess is appealing to me.”

“Those are the worst two reasons I have ever heard for keeping a kid.”

“Well you come up with something to tell my dad when he visits next,” Laura retorted with a giddy grin down at Danny.


	29. Chapter 29

It’s hard for Carmilla to differentiate between the types of love she has felt throughout her short life and long afterlife.

She cared for her parents as a proper young lady should, though she was never quite good enough for their lofty standards. Polite affection with strained conversation over well-catered meals twice daily plus proper games played in a proper parlour. Carmilla had never been more bored and she had spent some serious time with only herself for company.

Then there was Mother.

Carmilla learnt how to be the favourite child for once. Though she had no siblings, her parents preferred other, better children to their own. Mother gave every pretence of loving and caring for her favourite daughter. The manipulative nature and the lack of real choice in her life didn’t come until many, many decades later.

Ell was her first romantic love. The first one where she knew what she wanted and was willing to stick her neck out to pursue it. It was with Ell that Carmilla figured out that some types of love were worth more than others. She would spit in Mother’s face for her girl, would turn away from her life. Carmilla did not know how long it would have lasted before the idealism wore off, but it would have been nice to try.

When she was blasted out of her coffin, there was no room to love Mother. Carmilla was done with tragic, fatalistic love as well.

Falling in love with the world was easy. Travelling around Europe and parts of Asia enraptured her in between bouts of kidnapping and sacrificing every twenty years. Architecture, literature, philosophical thinking, all of it was hers and she had an eternity to swim around in all of it.

Then there was this girl.

This supportive, driven, kind of homicidal girl that pulled Carmilla’s interest immediately, who cared about her. The damn girl who enchanted her so thoroughly that Carmilla took a sword to her own Mother. The all-consuming love that Laura Hollis demanded drained her poor, tired heart until she was so exhausted that she went crying to freaking Xena for help. Having a partner, romantic or otherwise was new to Carmilla and the giant always seemed to be so damn sure of herself.

Carmilla cried on her shoulder, because Laura would never believe it even if she had video proof. Danny took it like a champ, and Carmilla wanted to know how she could put herself through helping the vampire her girl essentially left her for. Danny shrugged and said that it was worth it to see them both happy.

Selfless love, which she thought she was doing by killing Mother, was so compelling to her that next thing she knew, her lips were pressed against Xena’s and the worst conversation ever was awaiting them both when Laura got home.

Danny didn’t exactly pull away. Laura barely paused when they told her, collapsing in a stress-filled heap in Danny’s lap.

This was the exact moment Carmilla stopped trying to explain love to herself.


	30. Chapter 30

Carmilla wishes this had gone better. Meeting Papa Hollis was supposed to be a joyous occasion where her and her two girlfriends managed to gather around the one good parent they had between them. Danny’s parents were so far beyond absent that they might as well be living on Mars while Carmilla’s family issues had their own issues.

Laura’s father was fabled among the students of Silas as the man who raised the young woman who tore down each and every establishment the school had and convinced the resident vampire and the most righteous warrior to go along with her every plan. Handling that through teething must have taken a truly amazing individual.

His first real visit to the Silas campus was an unplanned one. Papa Hollis was on business in the country and decided to pop by and check to see if his daughter was paying attention to her studies rather than the sort of investigative journalism work she had focused on all throughout her high school career.

The school barely had a usable map that was easy to access. He tried not to think about what exactly it was printed on nor why it seemed to be marking his current position with a drop of blood he thinks came from the paper-cut he got upon picking it up. When he asked around for the landmark institutions Laura told him about, students regarded him warily then answered his questions like they were telling him the tumour was malignant.

The Summer Society said they hadn’t seen their de facto leader or her ‘little fight-y girlfriend’ at all that day. Papa Hollis felt young women drilling guerrilla warfare tactics didn’t have any reason to call someone else ‘fight-y’, but he took their directions amicably enough.

He tried to find the Library, and was told six different destruction stories by five different students. All of them said Laura would be in the former Dean’s apartment, though they giggled after he told them who he was to her. A ginger student being followed by a human head of curls wished him the very best of luck with that, only to be hurried along with admonishments following the pair into the evening fog. Styria didn’t seem quite so creepy in the literature Laura showed him when she picked it.

This led to Carmilla’s current predicament.

Four lies swirled around in her head, each providing a plausible explanation why she would be out the front of Mother’s house with an apple on her head and a drunken giant attempting to shoot it off her head with a crossbow. The bow and arrow had been tossed aside as a bad idea. Clearly.

Neither of them noticed the man they had only heard stories about until Laura was at the front door yelling about Papa being there.

Then Danny missed fairly impressively.

Carmilla stood perfectly still against the tree, trying to find her words. Explaining why you weren’t worried about the bolt through your kidney is not easy when you have a bolt through your kidney.


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first drabble that I already have sequels written out. I like this kind of AU, almost all of my Teen Wolf stuff is in this kind of thing.

The raiders come at dawn, led by the insufferable Morgan woman. Her black hair flew freely without fear of being grabbed. Lilita Morgan didn’t do fighting, she had her children and her soldiers to do it for her. This tactic of remaining clear bolstered her soldiers’ spirit with her many ‘children’ channelling the strength into focused points of attack that had burst through the outer defences in minutes.

That wasn’t Guard Captain Lawrence’s problem. Whatever defences were failing was the responsibility of the military men who pushed their way into the castle and took over once Morgan’s raiders started to pose a threat. The princess was her problem, her only worry. Laura was the extent of her duties, and keeping her alive while her father steadfastly refused to retreat to their more secure castle to the north was Danny’s entire life for the next few days.

Of course, Laura still hadn’t developed a healthy sense of self-preservation which left Danny seriously considering knocking her out and carrying the damn woman out of the besieged castle. That would make her life easier.

The princess was watching the battle raging in the streets with her lower lip drawn between her teeth. She grasped a short sword tightly in one hand and clutched at the edge of the window with the other. Danny stood a carefully respectful distance away, hands fidgeting nervously behind her as the sounds of battle grew ever closer.

A roar went up in the middle of the fighting, so loud and incongruous that Danny forgot herself and rushed to stare out over Laura’s head at the sudden anger on both sides. A group of Morgan’s raider smashed through the last lines of defence between the raiders and the princess. Morgan’s messenger was clear, the king could live or die, they wanted the princess alive. Danny shuddered as the many reasons why raced through her mind while the small group crashed through the rest of the castle guards without slowing down.

“We need to go, now,” Danny whispered, placing a hand on the small of Laura’s back. The princess leaned back into the touch, her sad eyes turning to her sworn protector. Danny swallowed the lump in her throat, she was going to ask something that would get Danny killed.

“There’s only twenty of them,” Laura said, the underlying question sending Danny’s heart racing. The sounds of fighting grew close, they had maybe minutes to run. Danny checked her weapons, twenty against one was a tall order, even for her.

Footsteps slapped against the cold stone hallway outside the princess’ bedroom. The door didn’t even lock, a father’s fear of fire overriding security. Danny drew her sword and prepared to start killing their way out.

“Please don’t shoot,” a female voice pleaded while fighting for breath and pushing the heavy door open. A dark head of hair appeared with a loosely armoured raider underneath. “Mother will be here soon and you don’t want to be here when she arrives.”

Danny locked eyes with the raider, one of Morgan’s children, and lowered her sword. Laura couldn’t decide which warrior to stare at.

“I hope you know what you’re doing, Carmilla,” Danny broke the silence, toying with the hickey still blooming on her neck.

“I do. Come on, Princess, I don’t bite much.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who wanted a Fallout 4 AU? Do you know how that game freaking starts?!?! I have made myself sad just writing the tutorial bits


	32. Chapter 32

Technically they started the trip in Alaska. Neither Laura nor Danny thought to check the agreement Carmilla made to get them there via boat so they ended up in Alaska rather than Russia. Their girlfriend missed the mark by an entire continent, technically, and they would never, ever phrase it less hyperbolically.

A bear tried to attack them. Laura had no idea if it was Carmilla’s claws or Danny’s crossbow bolt that killed it but it was really dead and she was starting to wonder if there was an exemption to hunting laws or whatever if your life was in danger.

They immediately changed their plans from crossing Europe east to west, to the Americas north to south featuring some eastwards movement.

“We could stay here and play rugged survivalist with the Gum Drop over there,” Carmilla mutter conspiratorially to Danny when they decided to make camp for the night rather than pushing their luck with the wilderness. Sometimes they understood each other on a deeper level than Laura could ever hope to attain. “I propose you fake an injury of some kind.”

“If I say no to faking it, are you going to break one of my legs?” Danny shot back, remembering what happened to her car the one time she was asked to fake an engine problem. “Because that’s a whole new type of wrong for you.”

Carmilla wanted so badly to be offended but she did nearly kill Danny out of starvation before they were technically together, leaving her without an argument to stand on. “No, but I might have a sudden blood lust for bears out here in the scary, scary wilds.”

“Please tell me you didn’t do this on purpose,” Danny whined. She knew it was showing weakness, but she was in Alaska and she could swear on a toaster oven that she could see Russia from their camp and that wasn’t okay. “I might actually be mad at you if you did.”

Carmilla stopped her line of worrying with a hard kiss, one that short-circuited Danny’s brain for a moment. Laura stopped messing with the heavy hunks of wood they’d collected for the fire to admire the two of them all getting along and stuff. If Laura was taking the opportunity to indulge a newly discovered voyeuristic side, then neither of them needed to know that until they were safely home and in the comfort of their own bed.

Pulling back, Carmilla smirked at the dazed look on the giant’s face. It was nice to be appreciated via struck-dumbness once in a while.

“Laura,” she purred, using her lover’s name to full effect, “I decree that it’s bear season. First one to five kills wins, Xena.”

Danny blinked hard to get the stars out of her eyes. Carmilla should not be allowed to use anyone’s actual name if it was going to sound like that, Danny thought with an annoyed grumble.

“Are we admitting that we wanted to go extreme camping or are we still pretending we missed the continent of Europe by accident?”

Carmilla averted her gaze to the clear and beautiful sky. “Shut up, Cupcake.”


	33. Chapter 33

The camping trip had to be about sex, right?

There was no way Carmilla Karnstein and Danny Lawrence finally decided to agree on something other than liking Laura without a generous measure of collusion and ulterior motives. There was absolutely zero doubt in her mind that they were taking her somewhere private which by Silas standards meant the middle of the woods.

Danny drove the entire way with one hand on the wheel and the other placed daringly on the inside of Laura’s thigh. Laura dealt with the squirming anticipation for the full hour the trip took. Carmilla was predictably napping in the back seat, disappointing Laura due to her girlfriends’ tendency to get competitive with her pleasure and affection was only heightened by close quarters.

The campsite was secluded and met both Carmilla’s and Danny’s security standards. Laura flew out of the car with an exuberant energy that only stunned the both of them into temporary inaction. They shared a glance and began unloading the car while Laura dashed about the campsite, eager to take all the wonders of nature in before the sun set and she was otherwise occupied.

Danny set up a lovely camp in blistering time while Carmilla found a nice warm spot to sun herself on. Laura bit her tongue against any and all duelling personalities coupled with cat jokes that wanted so desperately to escape. Head in the game, do not get distracted, she told herself. Just as she told herself to keep it together, Danny did a lifting thing and Laura had to cross her legs until she was done. Carmilla either didn’t notice or was secretly right there with Laura in her sudden problematic state.

“We should be good for the night. I’m not sure if you want to zip the sleeping bags together or leave them separate or if you just want to play to our respective nocturnal advantages?” Danny asked, breathless. She addressed the last portion of her question to Carmilla. Laura could spend the rest of the day guessing what the heck she meant by that, but Carmilla saved her the trouble.

The vampire cracked one eye open, “the first option and the last one works for me.”

The disinterest in Danny’s potential plans was the first sign Laura had that she might have maybe possibly read the situation wrong.

Laura sighed and lay back on one of the many, many picnic blankets provided to Silas students.

“Are we boring you, Hollis?” Danny asked, smug for one reason or another. Carmilla sat up from her sunning spot to observe, also smug. Deeply suspicious. “Because we can turn in early if you’d prefer?”

It was a trap, an Admiral shouted in her ears, but Laura wasn’t especially great at identifying those at the best of times and Danny was all sweaty and Carmilla was all not wearing all that much and Laura is only one human young woman okay?

“I’m amenable to just the first choice, if you are, Xena?”

Laura was one person and she was going to spontaneously burst into flames by the end of the night.


	34. Chapter 34

Despite their respective attitudes towards selfless heroism, Carmilla didn’t hate Danny Lawrence.

The giant was a hard woman to hate, all honest interest in not only her girlfriend, but her girlfriend’s girlfriend as well. Danny’s level of effort in making peace with Carmilla was leaps and bounds ahead of the vampire herself would make on her own. The attempts to make peace only amounted to not escalating a fight already in progress, but still, more than Carmilla wanted to do.

Carmilla’s feelings on tall, ginger, and athletic were of frustration. She took Laura time away from the total monopoly Carmilla had before, she knew what to do when Laura got all up in arms about literally anything, and the aesthetic she introduced into Carmilla’s life was driving her to distraction. Worse still, she couldn’t suck up her pride and do something, anything about it.

The vampire knew she wasn’t exactly tall. In fact, she had cut back on Laura-based short jokes when the ginger wonder girl pointed out the relatively small difference in height between Laura and Carmilla herself. This fed directly into her current problem.

It was the deep hours of the night when they got back from whatever dorky date the idiots had gone on this time. Carmilla was tired of reading on her bed so she propped herself up with a good book, the moonlight, and a solid wall to lean against. She was using every vampire-enhanced sense she possessed to pretty much see in the dark, so it was perfectly understandable when Laura burst into the room dragging a much larger body behind her and neither of them noticed that they weren’t alone.

Danny kicked the door closed with her heel before Laura slammed her into the solid wood, eliciting two very different groans that harmonised when Laura dragged the giant down to her lips. Carmilla’s quiet appreciation of Danny from a purely physical perspective shifted suddenly to a keen interest of Laura rising to the tips of her toes while Danny stooped to reach her target.

Hands spread over Laura’s lower back, clawing for her to be closer, for more contact. Carmilla put her book down silently to get a better viewpoint, knowing that she was beyond the point where explaining her silence away was remotely possible. Laura evidently couldn’t decide what she wanted to do with her captive, to pull her closer or to push her back to get at her belt and shirt and pants and whatever else Danny was wearing.

The usual pang of jealousy faded, barely a blip in her mind anymore already, and she wanted to press against Laura’s back and help one of them. Carmilla didn’t care which at that moment, either divesting the giant of her clothes or adding another set of wandering hands to Laura’s body. Danny’s shirt landed so perfectly on her face that she wondered which one of them knew she was present.

Neither broke stride, and Carmilla was left to stare in awe at them both, wondering what exactly it felt like to kiss someone that much taller than herself.


	35. Chapter 35

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a scrapped ending for the novel-length We Three Idiots story I spent NaNoWriMo working on. I changed my mind about what the last story, timeline-wise, in the series is going to be and this ending does not gel one bit with it. (also figuring out the Big Bad with more detail kinda took the punch out of this anyway.)

They hear the door smash open and off its hinges as a dull crack. The underground safe room muffles most noises whatever is happening could make. That’s what Carmilla insisted on it being capable of doing as well as the necessary protections of people of her calibre. Laura’s vampire wife couldn’t get in here if she wanted too, and she was gambling on Danny not being able to manage it either.

Laura held their ward to her chest, Jason’s slight frame shivering with fear at the crashing filtering through the heavy walls.

Any remaining doubts Laura had about Carmilla’s sudden new ability to predict certain events in the future vanished as soon as the vampire called her from the battlefield Danny had apparently died on to confess a potentially terrible decision she’d made in a panic smothered by heartbroken loss.

The Dean’s will was rather specific on the subject of turning people. Carmilla knew not to turn the healthy, the in-shape, and absolutely not people that were warriors in their first life. Major Danny Hollis was born fighting and died that way too.

Carmilla’s borderline hysteria was gut-wrenching and horrifying.

“She’s coming for you, she’s hungry,” was all Carmilla said before she hung up to give chase. Laura knew how close Danny’s military training, tactics, and equipment brought her to an even match for the vampire. Adding in superhuman strength and speed could only make her exponentially more powerful.

There was a good reason why the Dean chose sick little Mircalla from the ball and not one of her strapping military suitors.

“Laura!” Danny’s voice carried like Carmilla’s did when she was monumentally furious. It was like the whole house shook with the force of it.

Jason jumped at the noise, his chest rumbling with a growl that reminded Laura that she might be putting this boy in the position of defending her. Laura resolved immediately that that wasn’t going to happen, werewolf or not. He was barely thirteen.

Rubbing Jason’s back supportively, she stood and walked to the thick metal door. Her hand was most of the way to the handle when a second crash sounded from above followed by the unmistakable sound of a struggle. Carmilla had arrived, hot on the heels of their wife, much closer than Laura was expecting.

“Don’t,” Jason pleaded quietly, his eyes wide in terror. Laura didn’t really do that kind of fear, not that she wasn’t afraid. Danny could very well kill her and she wouldn’t even know it happened. She squared her shoulders and looked him right in the eyes before she spoke.

“I won’t have you see another family die,” she explained, plain and simple. “If she gets in here, run as fast as you can, okay?”

Jason nodded, the rare serious maturity descending onto his face even as his eyes watered.

Laura took a deep breath and forced the door open just wide enough to slip through.

The fight raged upstairs until it was suddenly downstairs. Carmilla’s unconscious body landed in their basement.

Laura wondered if Danny would kill her quickly.


	36. Chapter 36

The fight left Danny broken and bleeding out on the front porch of some family who would discover a dead human body where there was now a dying werewolf. Danny didn’t even know what it was that attacked her on the outskirts of town, just that it was small, fast, and feline. A regular panther couldn’t have outmatched her overwhelming strength, it was much too fast for any normal creature. In the moment she had to consider the enemy, she recalled thinking were-panther was a freaking ridiculous concept.

The line between unconscious and dead was one Danny was happy to jump all over for the rest of her short life.

As she faded in and out of awareness, she caught the scent of the greatest library on the entire planet. Danny found enough energy to notice she was beyond the help of the moon, leaving her human, and to raise her head up far enough to see a darkly dressed pale woman silently opening and closing the front gate Danny fell over stumbling through the streets.

The front door to the house flew open, revealing a half-asleep woman in her Batwoman pyjamas with an extra large mug held in one hand. The woman’s eyes darted from the walking library to the dying stranger with far less shock than Danny felt the situation required.

“Carm, if this is a weird cat thing, we are having the ‘As Little Murder As Possible’ talk again,” the woman scolded without screaming at the top of her lungs.

“She’s a werewolf?”

Danny didn’t buy into any of the ‘Alpha’ bullshit, but kitty was not in charge around here. Also, this jackass was going to get away with murdering her.

“Was she eating babies when you found her?” The pale woman looked anywhere but at Pyjamas. “Bring her inside right now,” she snarled. Danny kind of wanted to play pack dynamics with the human woman too.

Danny was not a short woman, the were-panther (still stupid) was a short woman. Danny allowed herself to be properly shocked when she hoisted Danny cleanly off the ground, carrying her effortlessly into the house and depositing her on their sizable dining table. Danny tried not to think about the variety of scents floating around the table.

Danny passed out, possibly died.

Next thing she knew, there was a bright light and a roughened female voice reading her something in Latin.

There was one thing missing for her pretty sweet afterlife, even angels and demons had heartbeats and the woman didn’t and-

“You’re a fucking vampire, aren’t you? One of the cult lady’s kids with the weird-ass powers?” Danny forced out more or less clearly.

The Latin stopped suddenly, “you weren’t invading, were you?”

Danny’s vision cleared enough to glare at the damn panther vampire hybrid asshole.

“Could have asked that before tearing me to shreds,” Danny snapped, feeling justified due to being nearly killed for no reason.

“Oh no, you two will be damn nice to each other until the werewolf is healed, am I clear?”

Danny would have to ask around on the subject of pack dynamics.


	37. Chapter 37

“Laura?” Danny’s tentative voice came through their cracked open bedroom door. She had lost the glaring and grunting match with the vampire, volunteering herself for checking-in duties. “I brought you some tea and soup, Carmilla made the tea unless you like it then it was totally me.”

Laura knew the tea came from the batch Perry brought over that morning in a giant container that made her seem tiny. She couldn’t find her usual enjoyment of Danny and Carmilla being ridiculous people, sending her into another painful spiral downward that forced her to answer Danny not with words, but with a muffled groan.

Danny entered their bedroom quietly, approaching Laura as one would approach an angry bear. “Would you like me to stay?”

Laura’s head popped up from between the covers she’d wrapped herself in the previous night and refused to leave. It was the first time in nearly a full day that Danny caught sight of her lover. In short, Laura looked terrible.

Her eyes were bloodshot, her nose rubbed raw, and the despondent expression only made the whole picture worse. Laura didn’t so much react as she gave in, “’course.”

Danny placed the totally freshly-made tea on Laura’s side of the bed and sat herself down on the edge to let Laura decide what proximities she was okay with and give ample warning every time she moved. “Perry and I have got the details down to the bare minimum. Carmilla is leading LaFontaine on a merry adventure of ye old traditions that she’s completely making up as she goes. Kirsch has been told he isn’t to be here until Perry tells him to be. All good.”

If she had any tears left, Laura would certainly be spilling them. She sobbed dryly and looked like she was going the throw up for a moment before giving up her tenuous hold on her body and collapsing into Danny’s arms.

Danny rubbed her back and held her close. “Flight leaves in the morning. Red-eye, figured you can pass out while I get to laugh at vampire versus modern technology. I have a quiet bet with LaFontaine that she gives up and just poofs herself there.”

Laura laughed and coughed, her stomach trying to remove itself forcefully. “Tea?”

Danny bit her lip to stop the sad whine that wanted to escape. Laura Hollis should never, ever sound so defeated.

“We do need you to sign some stuff when we get there,” Danny started once Laura managed a few mouthfuls, “Perry and I can only do so much legally speaking.”

“I know, I’m next of kin and all that jazz,” Laura said in a monotone that only worried Danny further. “Will you be joining us tonight or am I sleeping with the fuzzball alone again?”

“There was things to organise and kitty’s much better than I am at the silent comfort thing.”

“Thank you, when’s the-?” Laura couldn’t finish her question.

“The funeral’s in two days, the police will come to your house tomorrow night and we’ll keep Carmilla from murdering the other driver as a group effort.”


	38. Chapter 38

Danny was not kissing Laura when she got home. Fangface could handle it for the rest of the night or however long it took for Laura to brush her teeth. Walking to the damn store at two in the morning she was willing to do every night for the next few months if she didn’t have to deal with the end result of Laura’s utterly disgusting sense of taste at the moment.

The stoner working greeted her with a mumble that she had puzzled out to be ‘Valkyrie’ after the last month of this routine. Danny nodded and grabbed the collection of processed meats and salted crackers that made Danny’s healthy heart squeeze in commiseration for Laura’s.

The kid she wasn’t even thinking about after she searched the top consequences of what dietary items Laura craved. One bout of panic was more than enough and the doctor said it was okay and that was good enough for Danny.

The stoner kid gave her too much change like he always did and she wanted to shove the loose change up his nose. Sleep deprivation might be starting to get to her, when Danny was being completely honest with herself. How people did this as a couple or by themselves, Danny had no idea, but she was impressed as hell by them.

Dragging herself to their new home, Danny fumbled around with her keys until Carmilla very helpfully opened the door Danny was using to support herself as she tried. Carmilla caught her easily, swinging her arm around Danny’s waist.

“Maybe you can stop beating yourself up, still, and I, the nocturnal one in this relationship, can take the midnight cravings,” Carmilla grumbled as she helped one of her idiots to the other one. “Seriously, takes two whole people to make a kid and you both did as much as you could to prevent this from happening.”

Danny wanted to protest that she was just taking the responsibility for her own actions and this argument made more sense a month ago when she was getting four hours of reliable sleep each night. Going at it with the vampire was not something she had the capacity to do at this point.

“If there’s a damn fire or a kitten up a tree while you’re like this, who will save them?”

Danny chose to ignore her in favour of stumbling off to collapse in bed. It was the busiest time of the year for fires and Danny needed to be at her best if she was going to do her job without fucking it up, which was far worse than a pissed off and pregnant Laura Hollis. If Carmilla wanted to take that on, then Danny’s tired brain was going to let her get right on with that.

“Is she awake this time?” Laura asked when Carmilla returned from guiding the big dummy to bed. “I think we should look into locking her in there at night.”

“Imagine what she’s going to be like when the kids shows up.”


	39. Chapter 39

The bullet went through the leg of the mugger just as he tried to hold them up for all their money.

Laura and Carmilla were wandering home from a lovely dinner and a show date when the masked man jumped out from behind a dumpster in an alleyway. Laura knew she was never going to here the end of this from her father, especially since her latest supply of bear spray had only arrived yesterday. She considered fighting back using her years and years of martial arts and self defence training until she saw the gun in his hand.

Their lives were not worth the cash and jewellery they had on them that night. Laura sighed and held out a hand to stop Carmilla from fighting either. Her girlfriend was almost certainly going to do something rash and get them both killed with bravado alone.

The mugger smirked behind his ski mask, happy for compliant victims for once.

None of them heard the actual firing of the bullet. Laura felt the splatter of blood against her feet before the mugger screamed shrilly without any restraint. Carmilla leapt back away from either the noise or the blood, Laura couldn’t say either way.

The mugger fell to the ground clutching his calf as he continued to scream. Almost no one reacted to the man shouting at the top of his lungs and bleeding all over the concrete in the middle of a bustling city. Just Laura, her girlfriend, and presumably the person who took the shot in the first place.

Laura craned her head back to see where the bullet came from, spotting a flash of red on the fire escape across the road. The flash flew downward, as if the person jumped from five storeys up. Laura waited for the second person screaming that night to break up the mugger’s wailing.

It didn’t come.

Laura spared a triumphant grin for the mugger and grabbed Carmilla’s hand to chase after their anonymous saviour. The figure with brilliant red hair trailing behind them disappeared around a corner with Laura and Carmilla in close pursuit.

Carmilla let herself be dragged off on another supposed superhero brightening the city one criminal at a time. She adored the single-minded doggedness Laura applied to any story worth telling.

The rounded the corner to find the street empty, silent parked cars without any drivers to direct them to wherever their saviour had hidden themselves. Laura changed her map of their route in her mind to compensate for this little stroll into a deserted street, hoping to catch the hero anyway. Carmilla bit her tongue to not argue against calling a sniper wasn’t exactly superhero material.

They were nearly to the next block when their was a crack from directly above them closely followed by a leafy branch falling directly in front of them. A halo of glowing red hair surrounded the woman’s hair, a case that totally didn’t included the components of her sniper rifle lay next to the woman.

Carmilla developed a quick and keen interest in their hero.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will be no Fallout AU because I just wanna write Carmilla/Ell forever pre-Great War and I've made me sad. (Laura's totally Piper though, right?)


	40. Chapter 40

Danny was like a baby giraffe after waking each and every morning no matter how much quality sleep she got the night before. She would stumble out of bed with at least one foot tangled in the blankets or, far more memorably, the one time she tried to stand with Laura’s legs still capturing her own leg. That ended with a broken nose as her reflexes weren’t the best after waking up.

The paint on their bathroom door was cracking under the repeated strikes from Danny’s forehead bashing into it every other morning. It took Laura and Carmilla a full week to notice the first cracks, as it was more than half a foot above either of their heads. Then it was open season on Danny and her little morning problem.

Attempt one to solve the issue started and ended with a dive bomb by Laura directly into Danny’s stomach. Danny responded by knocking them both out via head collision. Carmilla laughed uncontrollably for thirty seconds before she stopped abruptly and checked them both for a serious head wound.

Attempt two was impractical as a long-term solution but did technically work. Carmilla just pinned Danny to the bed and didn’t let her go until she was certain her girlfriend was fully awake. Of course this took most of an hour and left them all in need of a shower and the sheets needed changing. Laura let it happen three times more to get to the conclusion of impracticality because she isn’t a crazy person.

The third attempt landed them in the hospital.

No one would admit to the weird, drunken logic that led to Danny taking the migraine medication she had for bad days as ad hoc sleeping pills. They would collectively explain to the emergency department doctor that they essentially thought reverse psychology would work on Danny’s dopey morning mind.

It did not.

Laura had never fallen down a flight of hardwood stairs built to withstand an air raid. Describing the noise as stomach-turning was letting the feeling of bad things happening off too lightly. Every ancient hunter instinct firing in Laura’s body went off all at once, propelling her out of their necessarily-large bathroom to skid to a halt next to Carmilla at the top of their stairs to stare down at Danny’s not-unconscious body.

From what they could tell as they struggled underneath her long limbs being pure dead-weight, Danny wasn’t so much unconscious as she was in a deep sleep. She woke up as the got to the hospital, complaining that she was never drinking again.

That night it was officially decided after sixteen stitches, seven hairline fractures, and the mother of all scoldings from no less than four doctors, seven nurses, and a janitor that Danny would have to just deal with being unsteady each and every morning of her life she didn’t have a partner around to wake her up properly.

Carmilla, ever the impractical vampire, volunteered to rise before the sun, a grand concession, to tackle the hard work.

For Danny’s own good, of course.


	41. Chapter 41

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Raider part 2! I like writing this kind of universe

Princess Laura didn’t know what to make of her trusted Guard Captain, her personal bodyguard and protector from all things.

On one hand, Danny was careful, well-suited to such a protective position, and just on the improper side of caring for Laura that the princess liked a little too much for the king’s liking. On the other, she had totally slept with one of Morgan’s children and could be carrying Laura off as a prize and there was nothing she could do about it.

“I want her dead more than you do, Princess, so stop looking at the back of my head like I’m going to put you in your best virgin sacrifice gown and offer you up to Mother as tribute or whatever she wants,” the raider, Carmilla, announced without turning around. Guard Captain Lawrence snorted then coughed to cover it somewhere behind Laura that the princess couldn’t quite pinpoint. No one that tall should be so adept at sneaking around. “Oh shut up Stretch, I could have killed her.”

“You could not, I’ve seen you desperate and you’d need more than Mother issues to bring out a killer in cold blood from that big heart of yours,” Danny argued, ending the discussion effectively. When Laura turned to find the source of the noises, she was met with the manoeuvrable leather armour her Guard Captain preferred. “Problem, Princess?”

Laura bit the inside of her cheek. This woman had been lying for who knew how long and was very clearly sleeping with one of Lilita Morgan’s damn children, now was not the time for childish crushes on dashing heroes. Especially when said heroes sounded so genuinely concerned and her eyes were doing that big, blue honesty thing that Laura could swoon over for eternity.

“How many princesses do you need?” Carmilla stopped their forward progress through the woods completely. Danny’s attention shifted for a brief moment and a flash of a smirk.

“Calling yourself a princess now?” Danny threw out with that casual cockiness Laura had to stop herself from smiling at. “Nothing untoward will ever happen to you so long as I am alive. I take my vows very seriously.”

Laura did not stomp on the arch of Danny’s foot. Laura also did not slap her across the face when she inevitable curled downward, reacting to the pain in her foot. Laura didn’t feel the angry tears welling up.

“You are sleeping with the enemy and effectively kidnapping me, ‘untoward’ was a while ago, Lawrence!”

Carmilla nearly broke her stomach cackling at them both, mostly at Danny. “Oh Red, didn’t get your anguished declaration of love out before Mother arrived?”

Danny recovered as fast as usual from being caught off guard. Laura glared hard, but softened when Danny placed tentative hands on her hips.

“I might have a big heart too,” she said lamely instead of saying what she wanted.

“It’s not hard, really,” Carmilla added, helping about zero percent, “’I, Hero Charming, love you, Princess Problem Child, almost as much as I am a fool for the hot raider princess from across the lands’. An idiot could do this, you dumb dog.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On that one story that's like two months out from an update: I have 90% of the second half done. Chapters three and four are proving a challenge that I am procrastinating on.


	42. Chapter 42

Laura didn’t understand the appeal of trying to give oneself hypothermia and she was glad neither of her girlfriends’ subscribed to her outlook on rain.

To Laura rain was a signal that it was time to head indoors and snuggle in front of Netflix and possibly with optional clothing.

Danny became even more active and athletic than usual when there was the opportunity to play in puddles and mud thrown in and Carmilla was the rare kind of kitty that loved the heck out of getting wet.

Laura had very little on her mind while Danny and Carmilla were chasing each other around in the backyard of their estate home in the lands owned by the family Karnstein. They were dripping wet and chasing each other around only to tackle them both to the ground, making them dirty along with wet.

Glad to be in the relative safety of the covered porch, Laura tried to focus on the latest lady detective novel she had been looking forward to for months now. Then one of her idiots would yelp or shout or giggle especially loudly and Laura would spend the next five minutes alternating between staring at them fondly (Laura allowed herself the understatement) and trying to refocus on the exciting case the detective was working on this book.

“Hollis!” Danny grabbed her attention, Carmilla thrown over her shoulder like she weighed nothing. Laura stood up in case she had missed Carmilla smashing her head into her ground or something similarly horrendous. Carmilla sprung into action, turning smoothly into a big, black cat and bounding away from Danny with a rumbling growl. Laura shook her head as Danny took off after the panther without a glance back toward Laura.

Her book kept her attention for the next full hour, just long enough for worry to crawl into her thoughts. Carmilla and her pursing Danny hadn’t returned after went charging out of her sight. Laura dropped the book on their little table and dashed down the stairs heedless of the still-pouring rain.

Laura flew through the tree line and searched for any sign of red hair. Carmilla would be nearly impossible to find in this weather and lighting. She heard the roaring panther over the driving rhythm of the rain.

The noises coming from Carmilla stopped abruptly, worrying Laura even more.

Dashing along mostly overgrown trails, Laura made her way toward where the noises were coming from, breathing heavy and heart pumping. The flash of red falling to the ground jolted her into over-drive, her limbs screaming for mercy.

Laura broke into the clearing, stumbling to a stop at the vision she was greeted with.

Rain might be best taken advantage of by relishing in the warmth of the indoors. Laura had spent the first twenty-five years of her life believing in this.

Finding Carmilla pinned up against a tree with water dripping from her hair and Danny slowly lowering herself while maintaining her grip on Carmilla’s hips?

Laura considered a change of opinion was in order.


	43. Chapter 43

The bolt flew just right of the spray-painted circle on a tree. Laura lowered the crossbow with a pout. The swords went fine and she was a natural at throwing knives however the crossbow was eluding her and she hated it.

Danny didn’t say a word. A thousand little corrections of form or techniques presented themselves but she forced them down with an encouraging grin. Eventually she hoped Laura would stumble into the correct form like she did with the knives. The first three throws were terrible, then she changed literally two aspects of her motion and she hit dead-on the rest of the hours to the delight of the Summer Society sisters Danny was ignoring were watching them for her own continued sanity.

“Beanpole, please tell her what she’s doing wrong before I have to get up,” the asshole vampire said from her lounging position on one of the Summer Society’s many deck chairs, a heavy book sitting forgotten in her lap.

Laura flushed bright red, turning away from Carmilla and the watching Summers to hide her sudden shame and embarrassment. Carmilla turned in her chair and noticed the captive audience the three of them were commanding.

She snarled and hissed and generally gave the impression of a vaguely threatening individual, causing the brave warriors to scatter in an instant. Danny would never tell her about the stern glare they were actually running from, Carmilla like to be all ‘fear me’ every now and then.

Carmilla rose and threw her book onto the chair without looking to see if it landed. She crossed the little clearing they used for all manner of ranged combat training to place her hands on Laura’s arms, guiding her into the best positioning for firing accurately.

“If they come back, I’ll make them run laps or do laundry or eat their greens, something horrible,” Danny promised with a final glare on the one window with a face still peering through the glass. “She doesn’t have the fine motor skills to do it like that, blood-brain.”

Laura opened her mouth to defend herself, and promptly remembered her own inability to light a match. Laura closed her mouth and let her girlfriends argue over the best way for her to fire a crossbow properly without hurting herself. Very little of the discussion made much sense to her but she loaded another bolt and took the last few suggestions they threw out into consideration and let it loose.

The bolt went a full foot above where she was aiming and she reloaded, pulled it up, adjusted herself instinctively, and shot again for the bright pink target.

It hit home perfectly.

“Regular archery, maybe?” Carmilla suggested. “There’s no way she can learn that in under a day, right?”

“My Dad didn’t teach me anything that could be useful in archery, so it’s as good a choice as anything else,” Laura agreed, loading another bolt and re-firing perfectly again.

“I can’t wait to hear what he taught you to build javelin throwing skills, archaic hunting is my guess.”


	44. Chapter 44

Danny had a bad day at work, crashing through their door three hours late while swearing at her keys for no cooperating effectively.

Laura and Carmilla shared an inquisitive look, Danny didn’t generally do foul moods that lasted longer than a few minutes. A prolonged rage generally meant she’d burnt off some of her hair in a cooking accident or one of them had fucked around with her toothpaste which Danny was weirdly adamant about.

Danny came around the corner from the entryway to their living room, leaning against the wall with a stormy expression clouding her usually cheery face. “I’m going to bed for a nap, please don’t let me sleep longer than half an hour?”

Then she was gone.

“Someone tried to run her over,” Carmilla started the proceedings gently. Laura was disappointed by how tame she was beginning their little game.

“She found out about that set of handcuffs you’ve visited on your laptop seventy-six times,” Laura countered.

“There is no way you can prove that,” Carmilla paused to bite Laura gently on the neck, “she actively ran someone over and the broken bones fucked her car.”

Laura tugged on Carmilla’s hair until her lazy cat of a lover blinked her bleary eyes up at her. “Did you go for a drive recently?”

“No, but I have been in a car with her and I was terrified for my life and I’m basically immune to the more fatal sides of driving accidents.”

The stare-off lasted for a few moments until they broke into silent giggles as Danny audibly tripped over her own shoes in their bedroom.

“She’s pregnant.” Laura, eyes glazing over for a terrifyingly wistful amount of time.

“Well aren’t we talented,” Carmilla drawled. “The Joker killed her third lover she’s been hiding from us for years now.”

“No more comic books for you until you get some taste in villains.” Laura let Carmilla re-settle on top of her body. “She’s finally been caught stealing the solid gold bars that keep going missing in banks across Europe.”

“Planning to blow up the moon, got caught kicking the elderly for being too short.”

“Is going to dump us in exactly half an hour,” Laura effectively concluded proceedings. Carmilla moved around as her current position was apparently uncomfortable all of a sudden.

“It’s your optimism that I love most, really.”

They settled back down to the episode of some bland investigative journalism programming Carmilla enjoyed ignoring.

Exactly half an hour later, Danny stumbled out of their bedroom to collapse on the longer side of their corner couch. Carmilla decided Laura was no longer warm enough for her needs and cuddled into Danny’s side.

“I miss being her favourite person sometimes,” Laura lamented, smirking.

“I can feel my legs falling asleep already,” Danny moaned as Carmilla got comfortable. “Who won ‘what’s wrong with Danny’?”

“Were you involved in a vehicular incident?” Laura asked to Carmilla’s groaning.

“No?”

“Then I win.”

“I got into a fight with a bike messenger and three of my knuckles are technically broken.”


	45. Chapter 45

Laura stood in a graveyard of familiar names and unfamiliar faces. People she knew about only through stories and family histories. Never in person and never, ever for any longer than absolutely necessary.

The training process in her mother’s family was harsh and unfeeling. Kids abandoned to the streets with just enough training to survive and no contact with anything familiar until they were old enough and skilled enough to find their way home safely and with enough of a reputation to deserve a place in this graveyard. The graveyard of fallen Hollis heroes who slaughtered their way through the supernatural like it was their birthright, and they most certainly thought it was.

Papa had carried out her mother’s last wishes by keeping Laura so far away from that life that she didn’t even know vampires and werewolves and ghosts were a thing until she got all the way to Silas University.

Laura picked her way through the graves, matching headstones to deeds and dead bodies littered throughout Europe. Papa had raised her in Canada in the middle of nowhere to get away from them, and it worked.

Now she wanted to know her heritage, needed to know. Their child needed to know what could possibly go wrong later in life. The risks, cancer, diabetes, all that good stuff. Laura didn’t expect her sensible questions into her mother’s history to lead to an entire family of creature hunters.

Between the Hollis genes and Danny Lawrence in general, this kid might come out of the womb trying to kill Carmilla. That would be an interesting one to explain to the maternity staff. Laura felt the vampire hovering back at the car, senses on high alert for whatever might be coming for them, friend, foe, or worse, family.

Her mother’s grave was a hotly contested thing, her own will against the ancient traditions of her family. Papa fought long and hard with them, but he had a baby to raise on his own and they threatened to disappear him and abscond with her if he pushed it further.

It was just as nondescript as every other grave in the sizable piece of land. A basic name, birth and death dates, and a tally count starting underneath the relatively small letters and numbers. From the readings she had done, the marks were chiselled in as the individual went through their life. Learning that her father had taken her mother’s name boiled down to a power play that she wasn’t okay with. There wasn’t a stone that didn’t say ‘Hollis’ on it.

What most people would believe to be a mausoleum stood looming. Laura broke the rusted padlock and stepped inside.

As expected, there was a faint hum of magical energy as one of the floating chisels was working a mark into the stone. Larua searched around with her flashlight until she found the one with her own name and birth date on it.

The next one in line was blank and there were no other blank ones.

Laura waved Danny forward to lift it and carry it far away from here.

Her child wasn’t going in their records. Not while Laura could stop it.


	46. Chapter 46

Laura thought that cats hated water.

Carmilla didn’t have a driver’s license, yet she had a boating license. Danny spent nearly an hour figuring out how the heck she got a license to last ‘the lifespan of the holder’, and eventually decided that Italian vampires weren’t to be fucked with.

The boat that belonged supposedly to House Karnstein (a phrase she would use whenever the two of them were being annoying bastards) didn’t actually have sails, but was so modern Laura’s touch screen laptop with fine titanium plating got jealous. The damn thing had gyroscopic technology that even Danny’s casual interest in physics struggled with.

“I like the sun, I like us being alone, I like oceanic white noise, I love it when we break out the bikinis, what’s the problem here?”

That was all they got out of her after months of pestering before their Mediterranean trip around a host of islands Carmilla visited at one point or another throughout her years of experience.

For all of her pale skin, Danny Lawrence never burned. Laura couldn’t get into water without her sunscreen washing off and her skin burning bright red in what felt like minutes. She let her legs float in the cool water watching Danny and Carmilla diving further and further down. Eventually Danny had to give up and hoist her self up onto the boat next to Laura, dousing her with suddenly freezing cold water.

“She’s doing the annoying deep sea diver vampire thing,” Danny pouted while she wrung her hair out in Laura’s lap. Laura didn’t react at all, reacting only encouraged them. Danny grinned and kissed the deadpan look off her face. “No grumpy Laura please, fun day in the middle of the sea with the vampire diving bell.”

“You’re so cute when you’re jealous,” Laura cooed, kissing her again to comfort her a little. “She’s going to bring up some old shiny thing that you’ll get to geek out over for however long it takes for Carmilla and I to get bored and drag you back into the freaking bedroom this thing has for some ridiculously opulent reasons.”

“I am genuinely shocked this isn’t bigger and requiring a full staff to maintain, it’s ridiculous how much money her family still has,” Danny grumbled. “Maybe because the only surviving member can spend days at a time walking around finding priceless artifacts at the bottom of the ocean floor.”

Laura gave Carmilla an hour down there hunting for some gift to present to Danny because she was the worst assertive dominant vampire type in the same way she was a terrible cat.

“We’re getting bored by ourselves in an hour, right?” Danny automatically agreed with Laura’s thoughts. “I can’t be held accountable for my actions when there’s a king-sized bed waiting for us with some ridiculous thread count sheets and champagne you could sell and buy a car instead with the proceeds.”

“I think I’m starting to get my Dad’s point about the whole ‘sugar mama’ thing.”

“We tried to resist, initially.”

“We failed.”


	47. Chapter 47

They always knew when Carmilla was having a nice dream.

The vampire didn’t have weird dreams, nor horrific nightmares, she had long gone memories that kept her entertained on the rare nights her slumber was disturbed by dreams.

The memories were never bad ones either. Sleep was where the good bits of her long life came back for brief and precious hours.

Danny came in late from work, dragging her feet and slumping across the bottom of their bed with a deep groan. Laura continued to idly ran her fingers through Carmilla’s hair with one hand while messing with her e-reader with the other. Danny resisted the urge to just pass out to the exhaustion, taking in the vampire being asleep before the small hours of the morning.

“The fuck?” Danny was neither eloquent nor verbose when tired. “Sick?”

“Ell,” Carmilla mumbled in her sleep, causing Laura’s hand to still. The faint grin told Laura exactly which memory she was reliving this particular night.

“Shall we dance, dear prey?” Danny mimicked Carmilla’s version of the story perfectly. Laura liked it, a brief moment of joy before the Dead ripped them apart forever.

Laura rolled her eyes, “it’s been years, get a better vampire impersonation.”

“I’m tired, cut me some slack here,” Danny complained, rolling onto her side to glare at Laura properly. “I want kisses but she’s always so happy after this one.”

Laura squawked indignantly at the implication that her kisses were not as good as Carmilla’s.

“One more, please,” Carmilla moaned out. Laura’s annoyance at Danny faded in an instant, cute vampire trumped most things in Laura’s life.

Danny heaved herself up and slowly got herself ready for bed. This mostly consisted of removing as much clothing as possible in as little time as possible so Laura let her go in silence. She wondered to herself if Carmilla would finish her only romantic contact with Ell before she had to deal with a whole lot of Danny soothing the loss of physical affection as soon as the dream turned inevitably sour.

“Another minute?” Danny proposed over her shoulder while walking into their en suite bathroom to deal with the sweat caked onto her body after her day. The nightly shower would take five minutes and Carmilla would want to be awake for it.

Laura nodded, setting her e-reader aside to stare at Carmilla’s face to track the exact moment Ell pulled away from what she was feeling and therefore pulling away from Carmilla, Mircalla, whatever.

The shower had only started running when Carmilla agitated herself into consciousness, a hand reaching out from underneath the covers for a person who wasn’t there anymore. Her tired eyes blinked, seeing an Ell-shaped blur for the first few seconds.

Laura grabbed the outstretched hand, kissing the back of it reverently. Carmilla frowned while the intervening centuries caught up with her.

“Don’t go?”

Laura surged forward, restraint gone. The frown on her vampire’s face needed to be smiling and giving her just one more kiss satisfied endlessly.


	48. Chapter 48

When Laura was younger, she didn’t really consider what her wedding day would look like. Papa didn’t encourage or discourage it, the entire concept was foreign to him as a single man with an adopted daughter. All she knew was someone suitable dark and mysterious or bright and charming.

Thus, Laura was left at twenty-three with one of each and no clue about how to show that she wanted the rest of her life with them.

Papa Hollis ran a vineyard that reminded both Carmilla and Danny of some kind of mobster, though he was very clearly not Italian in any way. Laura brought them home with her for the first time after they had been living together for several years. Papa knew more details than he could ever need about his daughter’s unconventional relationship and was genuinely surprised to see that she wasn’t exaggerating anything about either of her partners.

The dark one was an actual vampire and the bright one was able to stand half a head taller than him barefoot while he was wearing his heavy work boots. He didn’t know what to do with either of them until Laura bossed them around as they got settled.

“Father,” she greeted him one morning while the vampire was asleep and the giant was jogging. He hadn’t seen her this serious since their water tower was poisoned by local idiot boys. He sat down across their functional and plain breakfast table.

“Daughter,” he replied in kind, equally serious.

“How does one propose to two different people?”

Not the strangest question he had ever fielded. Though it was the hardest to answer since the tear-filled demands to know what was wrong with her when she kissed a girl under mistletoe and her whole world made a painful kind of sense.

“They haven’t scheduled a duel for your hand in marriage yet?” Flippancy was the only way to go with Laura’s Very Serious Questions. Laura had never, ever had a question like this without already knowing what she wanted the answer to be. Laura glared at him. “Conventionally, I suppose. Legality is another matter.”

Laura groaned and dropped her head onto her folded arms. “I just want them forever and I don’t even care about dresses and suits and flowers but I want something tangible.”

“We go shopping for something tangible then, I will get my driving gloves, you secure the girlfriends in some sort of chess battle or similar small war situation,” he rambled, racing out of his chair excitedly.

“That,” Laura said into the empty room, “was not what I wanted, but I will take it.”

Wandering up the stairs to her bedroom, she began considering what the heck to occupy them both with for several hours that wouldn’t arouse suspicions.

Carmilla didn’t do sex dreams. The quick gasp was a tell. Laura made sure her Papa was elsewhere in the house before opening the door.

Carmilla met her eyes with a knowing look, as if she hadn’t let Danny in Laura’s bedroom window for morning shenanigans.

“Jewellery is fine, we talked it out.”

Laura rolled her eyes and left them to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two updates today because it sucked and I need to feel better about literally anything.


	49. Chapter 49

They knew what it was like in the abstract, the blood.

Carmilla had assured them that she was fine brushing her teeth after eating, why the hell weren’t they joining her? Didn’t they care about the health of their teeth at all?

Laura did not even remotely like the taste of blood and knowing it was human blood just made the problem worse. Carmilla had taken to carrying a strong bottle of vodka to clean out her mouth on the go without Laura being discomforted by Carmilla having to brush her damn teeth before every time they kissed.

Danny Lawrence ate her steak so rare, Laura was concerned for her long-term health and what undercooked meat could do to it. Danny either didn’t notice the taste of human blood lingering in Carmilla’s mouth, which was worrying, or she didn’t care, which was slightly more worrying. Unlike Laura, she would be totally honest about any problem she might have.

The issue of blood was by far the oddest problem they had for the sole reason of not having anyone to turn to who had any vaguely related experiences to compare it to. Even vegans dating full on omnivores didn’t have the added complication of their partner needed it to live, rather than largely a dietary choice. Carmilla had to drink blood and at least once per week, it needed to be human or she wouldn’t be able to function properly.

“You know you can speak up if it bothers you?” Carmilla asked for the fourth time, mostly drunk from getting carried away with rinsing her mouth out for Laura. The tiny woman wasn’t exactly happy about having her own ability to tolerate an inconvenience called into question. Danny had to eventually point out that Laura threw up the last time she had a split lip and it was her own blood in her mouth. Someone else’s was out of the question. “It’s my problem-”

“It’s not a problem, I promise,” Danny cut in, stirring Carmilla’s cup of blood with her little finger and licking the blood off speculatively. “Tastes like blood, metallic and somehow also red. No big deal, I bleed in my mouth all the damn time.”

“Oh, she knows,” Laura decided she was done sulking at her own nauseous stomach cutting into the determination her brain liked to talk big about. Carmilla hummed in agreement.

“You are utterly irresistible when you’ve had a little play fight with the girl group of idiots you call a sorority,” Carmilla let the predator out with a husky growl underpinning her voice. Laura shifted uncomfortably in her seat, eyes darting from one girlfriend to the other.

“Drink your lunch, dead girl, then we can talk,” Danny replied with a challenging tone. “I am three full months away from my last blood drive.”

Carmilla took the hint with superhuman speed, Laura didn’t even see her move before Danny was tasting her own blood from the veins in her neck.

Laura settled in for a long night of exploration that she got a front-row seat to observing.

For science or whatever.


	50. Chapter 50

The damn baby decided it liked Carmilla the most. The only option she was willing to deal with was by far the least experienced with kids of any kind. Their baby girl hated heights from the get-go, despising Danny and both of her grandfathers without reprieve if they were standing up.

Laura being the one to give birth didn’t move their girl, thanks for the temporary house mother, now let me get in on this vampire thing that’s way cooler than you.

While Danny was happy to have the kid on her chest while she lay on the couch listening to an audio book without complaint, Laura had nine months of not fun driving a little tiny piece of resentment that Carmilla took a laughably long time to notice. Danny wasn’t exactly given time off for her girlfriend having a kid, so it was up to the vampire to deal with a clingy baby and an increasingly low Laura. Carmilla was overwhelmed and panicked, focusing on the kid because Laura could at least feed and clean herself.

Laura left the house on one of her long drives that kept going for longer and longer the less contact she had with the kid and her partners.

Carmilla sprung into immediate action.

“You are going to get along with your mother and you’re going to love it, she’s pretty great,” Carmilla murmured to her daughter, holding her close and keeping her voice low. “If you can deal with the giant, she’s a walk in the park. Real close to the ground you seem to love too. Added bonus.”

Carmilla’s heart hurt when she caught sight of Laura’s exhausted and drawn face when she arrived home. If this didn’t work even a little, Carmilla was calling in Danny’s attention from keeping them fed and housed to the increasingly worrying Laura-shaped on-coming mental breakdown.

“You both need a nap, come on,” Carmilla announced without giving Laura nor the kid a chance to respond. Though if the kid said anything Carmilla would have stopped and potentially dropped her.

“She won’t like it,” Laura argued glumly as she followed her vampire and her daughter anyway.

“She hasn’t given it a chance and we’re going to fix that,” Carmilla threw over her shoulder, noting silently that they would also be visiting at least a counsellor on the subject of depression when Laura was ready. Getting Danny on side there would be simple. “Besides, she’s exhausted from a long day of pulling my hair so she’s going to pass out to it anyway. Great time to make a start now we have some time.”

“Oh, I guess I could sleep,” Laura tried real hard for nonchalant, her attention firmly set on the daughter who barely wanted her around with a cautious optimism.

“Who said there was a choice here? As the one getting some good sleep around here, you and Stretch are lucky I let you drive yourselves anywhere at this point.”

“Carm?”

“Yeah?”

“This isn’t okay, right?”

“I’ll show you the armchair diagnosis I found online after your nap.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comment if you liked it.


	51. Chapter 51

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things I shouldn't do: Write while seriously considering quitting writing.
> 
> Thing I did two weeks ago: Wrote while all of my fics were sitting in the Recycle Bin.

Danny knew she was beyond help as the demon or whatever stooped low over her paralysed body and grinned with teeth shining like rubies.

Laura’s student army wasn’t handling the battle with the steadfastness of soldiers, the beast only wanted one person and they all could find a fault in its choice if they looked hard enough. Some ran, others fought conservatively. They were all saints until it was life or death and death could prove meaningless and even worse, pointless.

They didn’t have the time left to save her anyone so one industrious student figured the easiest way out for the general population. Laura didn’t see the blow to the back of the head coming, nor did she feel it. Leader rendered unconscious, the students retreated with their tails between their legs and tiny Laura Hollis slung over someone’s shoulders.

Exactly seven minutes later, Laura would wake to clear skies replacing the blood red of before and would think for exactly two fleeting moments that they won, that everything was okay.

Carmilla eschewed the battlefield of silly little mortals, trusting that Laura could rally the troops and capture victory from the jaws of defeat if her own plan to stop the ritual didn’t go quite as she was imagining it. Xena was depending on either of them succeeding and Carmilla was perfectly okay being the back up plan. She didn’t need more ‘heroic vampire crap’ heaped onto her shoulders if she saved the damn day yet again. That’s what her conscious mind supplied, though her heart burned in outrage that she would dare do anything but her best to save her damn girlfriend.

The Library was deep and dark. Finding the correct tome and the necessary supplies took longer than she expected. Laura’s fight would have already started if the sun dropping dangerously close to the horizon was anything to go by.

Carmilla emerged with just enough time to perform the ritual banishing the demon back to the Hell it came from and immediately set it up and started, cursing the universe at large for having a dramatic flair that proved inconvenient time and again.

She got halfway through, then an angry mob did away with the distinction of correlation from causation and declared the continued presence of a vampire to be the cause of their problems. They conveniently ignored the fact that everything post-Dean tended to go the most wrong to Carmilla rather originating from her.

Carmilla was forced to take flight, running for her life with arrows piercing her flesh as she went. The pain was bright and brilliant and she wanted nothing more than to turn on them and begin a wholesale slaughter. The pain made her weak, the strain of Danny going missing made her lethargic, the stress of importance on the ritual she would never complete made her wild and panicked.

Carmilla lost the mob just as Laura lost consciousness, Danny making her peace with her Maker silently and with a brave face.

Carmilla panted with exertion, Laura’s little army had to succeed, right?

Right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I've suddenly discovered why people enjoy killing characters.


	52. Chapter 52

Danny’s family was normal. Laura and Carmilla didn’t quite get the concept. Between Papa Hollis’ extreme protectiveness clashed horribly with the warped sense of family and caring the Dean believed in made him look like Parent of the Year. The Lawrence clan was a little on the big side, both in number of members and the clearly genetic height, but they weren’t giving their kids bear spray or the head of a cult.

The bastards were friendly, kind, and just as willing to help out as the child they’d raised.

Danny smiled her big, dumb puppy grin with her bouncing enthusiasm and the boundless energy. They quietly blamed each other for agreeing to this in the first place though they knew deep down they were both curious about the home life that produced their girlfriend and her unshakable loyalty. Carmilla had money on some kind of criminal organisation where loyalty was more important than air while Laura felt Danny was a secret werewolf.

Perry overheard them talking about it once, setting them straight with the actual answer:

The Lawrence family were nice. Just nice. Nothing else. Perry knowing this however, was extremely suspicious.

While Danny was easygoing about other people being interested in her girlfriends, Carmilla and Laura were downright territorial on all fronts. Kirsch was basically banned from their dorm building even if Danny was with the Summer Society at the time.

Perry had to be tied to a chair and interrogated to get the information out of her, something Carmilla worried was becoming a trend with the Cupcake. Her answer was unsettling, they had spent the entirety of their freshman year dating. Perry went bright red while LaFontaine confirmed it with a shrug, like the whole affair was common knowledge.

Looking back, Carmilla knew that was the moment they decided to follow the Summer home for the summer. The mad jealousy burned brightly until it actually came time to see the Lawrence clan.

They liked Perry and Danny’s current girlfriends could see why. She baked, cared for those around her, and wasn’t much younger or a vampire.

Danny didn’t tell them that her family didn’t like Carmilla’s choice of major or Laura’s laser-focus on whatever she was doing. The ability to multitask was prized in the Lawrence family.

Her mother cooed over the waves in Carmilla’s hair while her younger siblings rushed Laura, spying an adult they could take in a wrestling match. Carmilla didn’t quite get not having an ulterior motive for doing everything and Laura was not built for tackling five kids at once.

Danny messaged Perry when Laura and Carmilla were soundly asleep, thanking her ex-girlfriend for giving her current girlfriend’s the push they needed to get over their collective fear of the unknown. She wisely kept quiet about the conversation until they were nearly back at Silas. Danny didn’t think they would believe it was a natural growing apart that broke them up.

They thought her dorky parents were crime lords. They would concoct something equally ridiculous for her and Perry breaking up.


	53. Chapter 53

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part One of 'I Write About Whichever Game I'm Playing' featuring a fictional Borderlands 3

Mother was always right.

Mother knew where a Vault was, and how to open it.

Visions of a monster stabbing a hole in a woman’s chest and a creature that resembled her storybook dragons taunted her every moment of sleep.

Carmilla wished the dragon would come and smash her ivory tower to dust. The glowing on her arms burned before her door shattered without fail. Last week, she took out an entire wall when Mother was particularly harsh.

Their compound was expansive and all she heard of the universe outside, aside from constant updates on Pandora, was through the wanted posters in the kind old sheriff’s office. The numbers drove her to dizziness.

What could a person possibly do to be worth that much money?

The question plagued her into her bedroom for the night, her window the only one with bars stopping any escape attempts. ‘Kidnapping Prevention’ is what Mother called it.

Carmilla settled into bed well before the noises started.

Whispers, coming from outside her window. At first she thought she was dreaming, then the voices cleared into words and her dreams were never this odd.

“How does the boss know there’s a Siren here anyway?”

“Laura, you think ‘Bullzerker’ is a word, if boss lady wants to sense one of her own kind or whatever, you don’t get to talk about silliness or doubting anyone’s mental capacity,” came a different voice followed by a mechanical whirring that had Carmilla up and out of her bed.

“Fine, why can’t Lilith come get the girl herself then?”

Carmilla approached the window slowly, tripping backward when a small flying drone buzzed between the heavy bars, lasers scanning the room with a red glow.

“You have that thing set to stun or recon mode, she has that, right?”

An angry grunt followed by the drone lighting up and blasting some kind of weapon at the bars, blowing them out of the window and off onto the ground below.

“Sure she does, but where’s the fun in that?”

A hook latched onto her empty windowsill, another mechanical noise quickly followed by a dark blue bandana with a skull and crossbones printed on the front covering a mess of red hair.

Carmilla settled an argument she’d been having with herself, deciding firmly on ‘women, definitely women’, and pulled herself up to glare at the interloper hauling herself into her bedroom.

“Stop calling it a she, Conscript,” the other voice hissed as another hook appeared. Dirty blonde hair appeared while the overly tall woman was assessing Carmilla’s threat level.

Carmilla felt the urge to blow them both up rising, but they wanted to take her away, and anywhere else had to be better than with Mother.

Wait.

Big, big numbers fluttered through her mind, adding names and titles to the faces staring at her like she was a damn deity.

“Danny? Laura?”

The both took a step back, Laura barely catching herself from falling back out the window.

“Our princess appears to in this castle, shall we?”

The smirk was tantalising and Carmilla let them guide her away from home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Borderlands and it's amazing music choices is actually where the entirety of Outrun My Gun comes from.


	54. Chapter 54

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sequel to chapter 34

They had to be doing it on purpose, somehow. They found out about her little adventure as a voyeur and were punishing her for it.

It wasn’t even dark this time. Carmilla was just sitting on her bed, minding her own business in the middle of the damn day when something slammed into their dorm room door. She heard Laura’s groan before the handle turned and was already bracing herself for the awkwardness that was about to ensue.

The giant would be looming large over their Larua with her hands clearly itching to wrap around Laura’s thighs to hoist her onto waiting hips. Carmilla buried her nose in her philosophy homework for the first time all afternoon to provide a viable alibi for why exactly she didn’t just poof out of the room when she heard them coming. Then she would have to admit why to herself as well.

They stumbled over each other as they entered the room, this time Danny all but throwing Laura into the door to force it closed. Danny bent over to get at Laura’s exposed neck with her teeth while her hands tried to undo the many buttons on Laura’s serious date shirt. Laura’s head lolled to the side, her eyes closed and hands underneath Danny’s shirt.

Carmilla put her homework down and was about to clear her throat before she witnessed the beginning of porn again when Laura’s eyes cracked open slowly, locking on to Carmilla immediately.

Instead of stopping and forcing the question of turning their two pairs into one three, Laura chose to bury her fingers in Danny’s hair and used her other hand to drag her shirt up. This encouraged Danny’s wandering hands and gave Carmilla an excellent view of what an athletic form looked like. Laura raised a questioning eyebrow, goading Carmilla into reacting.

Danny was doing that damn thing where she pulled Laura closer by forcing her onto her toes. Carmilla tilted her head, recoiling when Danny pulled back to make eye contact with her girlfriend. Laura’s hands snapped to the bottom of her shirt and immediately began pulling it upward and off, tossing it with perfect accuracy into Carmilla’s lap.

It was then that Danny noticed Laura’s attention wasn’t front and centre. Her head fell to the door above Laura’s head to stare at Carmilla’s openly interested expression, panting to regain control of her breath.

“I-well-don’t stop,” Carmilla hissed, clutching Danny’s discarded shirt in both of her hands. Laura moved Danny’s hands to her hips and turned to press her back into Danny’s front, setting Carmilla with a smug, questioning smile. “What?”

“’Don’t stop’ or ‘make room’?”

Danny’s focus was on Carmilla, who had never felt more like prey in her entire afterlife, and her hands finally won the battle against Laura’s shirt. It slipped off and joined Danny’s on the vampire’s lap. Then she made quick work on the clasp of Laura’s black bra.

Carmilla surged forward, wanting desperately to know what kissing Danny over Laura’s half-naked form felt like.


	55. Chapter 55

“There are horses.”

“You come from the prime time for horses.”

“I don’t like horses, or whatever other animals are at this damn place.”

“You’re dating a farm girl, you’ll be dealing with animals your entire life.”

“Shut up, Clifford.”

“Make me, Fangface.”

Laura burst out of the actual farmhouse they’d pulled up to and lit up at the sight of her girlfriends leaning against their car with their arms folded.

“She’ll be so disappointed that you hate where she comes from,” Danny needled smugly. “You could go with the tortured philosopher in the attic angle? Laura likes you all broody, I have heard that it’s sexy from at least three different people.”

“I am irresistible to the two of you,” Carmilla agreed vaguely, distracted by Laura’s tight-fitting plaid shirt and wildly free-flowing hair.

“Did I say anything about me?” Danny’s overly-innocent voice gave her away immediately, causing Carmilla to smirk up at her girlfriend. Anything to put off telling Laura she wasn’t especially happy being on a damn farm.

“You guys made it!” Laura shouted giddily, launching herself up into Danny’s arms. Carmilla jerked backward to avoid the sudden mess of limbs and locked eyes with a horse in the distance. She kept eye contact for as long as possible to establish herself as the boss in the relationship before Laura was released and attached herself to Carmilla instead.

“Yes, yes we did,” Carmilla said, bemused by just how excited the Cupcake was at the prospect of spending time on a damn farm. Didn’t she know the point of progress was largely a species-wide desire to not live on farms anymore? Carmilla was a Countess in a previous life, literally, and she did not appreciate being this close to crops.

“Does your father own a shotgun?” Danny broke into the quiet annoyance creeping into Carmilla’s posture. Laura froze in the vampire’s arms. “Great, I didn’t plan on seeing Christmas anyway.”

“It’s for rabbits and other small animals that are bad for the farm, not shooting suitors,” Laura defended her father admirably, eventually caving to the combined disbelieving glares of her girlfriends. They had spent months leading up to this trip hearing Papa Hollis stories, “I had a very serious talk with him about not suddenly deciding to clean his gun when you arrive.”

“We’re getting shot,” Danny groaned, hands covering her stomach in preparation for the wound. Carmilla sighed.

“If I get shot, I’m taking the horses with me, non-negotiable.”

Laura flicked her nose with an angry grunt, “no horse-murders. No one is getting shot, no one is killing my pets.”

“I don’t know, I might need some pig murders if I require stitches by the end of the weekend,” Danny threw into the discussion, angling herself on Carmilla’s side. A rare occasion. “Though I must demand you wear this more often. Like, everywhere, all the time. Pants are totally optional.”

Their heads tilted considering Laura without the sensible jeans and Laura rolled her eyes.

“Stop trying to get yourselves shot and get in the damn house.”


	56. Chapter 56

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More vampire Laura

The penthouse apartment had tinted windows. Not because its owner was especially susceptible to sunlight, it just offended her girlfriend’s dark and brooding sensibilities.

Laura Hollis looked out over her city, and it was most certainly her city, and wondered which facet of daily criminal life she was going to cripple that day. Yesterday they took out even warehouses full of illegal arms, that is, any arms whatsoever. According to Danny, gangsters tasted off in the drug addict kind of way which gave Laura the perfect target for their next assault.

A yawn from the bedroom portion of the open plan penthouse apartment drew Laura’s attention away from looking down upon her empire. Waking girlfriend came first, work later.

Carmilla generally wore what she had on when she first felt tired to bed, in this case it was absolutely nothing. Danny Lawrence as a vampire put the ‘lust’ in blood lust and was voracious until sated. Laura was out seeing to a shipment and she could only guess that Carmilla had only the brief daylight hours to sleep after Danny was done with her. She certainly bore the wounds well, like badges of honour.

“Why good morning, sleepyhead,” Laura drawled mockingly, smirking at the pout gracing Carmilla’s lips. “Did you have a restful night’s sleep?”

Laura didn’t flinch as the wall behind her caught fire with the heat of Carmilla’s tired glare. She merely raised an eyebrow and the fire was gone, Carmilla’s annoyance sufficiently satisfied.

"Next time, you're taking care of her. You send her on the damn missions, you should be made to deal with the consequences,” Carmilla demanded, awfully serious for a naked lady. Laura didn’t break her stare, taking in her girlfriend in her half-awake form. “You’re having a power trip, aren’t you?”

Laura noted the pleasure her girlfriend took in stretching out her tired muscles and the way her legs crossed to relieve the sudden tension from her exhausted sex drive. Carmilla wasn’t sending any overt or subtle signals that she was totally done with them both today.

“Where did Danny scamper off to this fine morning?” Laura asked, slowly and deliberately wandering her way into their bedroom, toying with the hem of her sensible shirt the entire way. She didn’t like the lack of physical signs they sent out, a quickened heartbeat, shortness of breath. Being so very dead gave her so much less to work with.

“Heard a kitten stuck up a tree, probably,” Carmilla answered, seemingly disinterested. Laura removed her shirt in one fluid motion, getting Carmilla’s attention. “You know how she is.”

Laura knew what this kind of thing tended to be code for, Danny knew Carmilla needed different things at different times. Therefore she left to leave Carmilla to Laura for more gentle handling.

Laura climbed into bed, shoes and all, opening her arms for Carmilla to fall into. Her kitten needed silent physical contact sometimes, Danny wasn’t so great at the sitting still.

“She’s fetching you something fresh for breakfast, isn’t she?”

“Puppy does fetch so well now.”


	57. Chapter 57

Chemistry made exactly zero sense to Carmilla. Three centuries of time spent mostly at vacation spots and universities and the vampire could barely manage to cook without blowing something up in the process. When the damn kid came to her ‘office’ asking for help with homework, she was left woefully unprepared when Laura and Danny were off doing some cute thing with Danny’s family that sounded less appealing than having spikes driven into her hands. The kid hated the land of the giants too, so it was Dead Mummy and Alive Son Day in the Hollis household.

“Is it supposed to do that?” Carmilla asked, aware that she was now the student to her twelve year old son. He shook his head, dejected as he went over his textbook yet again to make sure he got the measurements correct. “What’s it supposed to do?”

He fumbled with the textbook before turning it around so she could see the cartoon image of an erupting volcano. “Like that.”

Carmilla frowned. Their solution hadn’t so much as bubbled. Carmilla was sorely tempted to search the Internet for whatever could be causing the problem rather than letting the kid figure it out for himself.

“What could be causing the problem?” Carmilla asked, patting herself on the back internally at the excellent teachable moment. Probably. There was a real good reason she insisted on the kid they adopted being old enough to function as a person, speaking, feeding themselves, that kind of thing. She knew damn well that she wasn’t the best teacher on the planet and traditional schooling subjects were a tad beyond her when she was alive, let alone after centuries of generally not caring about much of anything.

“Is it the right sort of vinegar? I can’t tell,” he ventured, holding the bottle out to her for a more experienced inspection. Carmilla’s heightened sense of smell figured out the problem immediately. She coughed a few times to get the scent out of her system. “Are you okay?”

The kid looked like he was about to personally beat the bottle to death for daring to hurt his mother, then he would call Laura and Danny to make the brave fight three against one because Carmilla attracted protective people to her.

“I’m fine,” she reassured him with a grin. She motioned for him to stay in the dining room as she left the house to get out of his earshot, pulling her phone out of her pocket.

Danny picked up in two rings. “Have you burnt the house down?”

“I am not the one keeping the bad vodka from the kid by cleverly putting it in plain sight. You are so damn lucky we decided against doing any of the experiments that required heating the damn vinegar,” Carmilla vented at Danny, growling in frustration more than actual anger.

“He actually asked for your help?” Danny was too excited for a person hiding alcohol.

“Yes and now I get to explain why he shouldn’t touch anything holding a clear damn liquid in our house because you two are idiots and I am not the responsible one in this relationship!”


	58. Chapter 58

Danny Lawrence stuck to a stringent diet of everything your doctor wanted to hear when they ask: “How’s that diet plan I put you on going?”

She was unreasonably active, actually weighed the meats she cooked for herself and ate carrots as a snack food, offending her girlfriend of six months to her core. It took forever and one single appearance by Carmilla for Laura to notice that while Danny did partake in pie, it was always the blandest, least sugary one she could find and Laura wondered what the point was of even eating it.

Carmilla hatched a clever plan that could in no way backfire on her to see what exactly would happen if Danny Lawrence broke her strict diet for one night.

Getting the giant to eat all of Laura’s candy stash was surprisingly simple if one framed it as flirting and actively goaded her into it. Brightly coloured sugar shapes were expertly eaten of Carmilla’s body only to be replaced by biting, possessive marks that Laura liked but Carmilla absolutely loved. Laura wanted to sit down and discuss Carmilla’s attraction to the cavewoman in Danny but always got mysteriously sidetracked from her point.

“Carm?”

“Yes, darling, dearest angel-face?”

“Don’t you try and butter me up. What did you do to her?” Laura had to ask upon finding Danny in the middle of a sea of unconscious people. “Is she drunk?”

Carmilla understood her confusion, they had moved things from the nice warm bed Carmilla was planning on screwing Danny into, to a bar on campus that actively encouraged the wild melee of the bar fight at all opportunities. “She is stone cold sober.”

“Did the rest of her side run away?” Laura was so happy the rage hadn’t set in yet, entranced by the blood dripping down off Danny’s knuckles and the already welling up bruises littered over her body. “We have to take her to a medical professional, don’t we?”

Carmilla shrugged, “personally, I believe we constitute a medical amateur between us and this way we even get to keep her like this and you’re totally starting to see it too, aren't you?”

Ah, there was her rage place. “What the hell did you do, Karnstein, don’t you dare lie!”

Carmilla shrugged again. “I gave her your sugar stash and then this happened instead of the hyperactive sex I was going for, and scientific curiosity, of course.”

Danny’s attention turned from her former victims and locked eyes on the two prettiest ladies in the land that she wanted to be hers more than anything in the whole wide world.

“Your cavewoman is aware we’re here, you idiot,” Laura hissed through her teeth. Carmilla was bouncing with enthusiasm. “Stop enjoying this, asshole!”

“But it’s everything I could ever had hoped for!”

Danny ignored their words, seizing the vampire by her hips and pinning her against the wall with her own. “Wanna have more, gimme more now,” she growled, either aggressive or childish. Carmilla didn’t care.

“You took my supplies!”


	59. Chapter 59

“This is a little too ‘Buffy’ for my liking, and this is coming from me,” Danny complained, though she didn’t make any moves to leave. “This is straight up disrespectful.”

“I’m dead and you’re disrespectful to me all the damn time,” Carmilla countered with a wink and a teasing smile so the giant didn’t take her seriously.

“Will you two be quiet?” Laura hissed back at them like three grown women stumbling around half-drunk in the local cemetery at three in the morning wasn’t deeply suspicious behaviour. No, them talking was drawing the many people to them, with their disapproving looks and police badges. “We’re just checking that everyone’s home where they should be, no harm in that.”

Danny sighed like she was the sober one. She wasn’t. Carmilla knew for a fact that Xena had gone through tequila shots like they were going out of style. Perry was never coming out to the bar with them ever again if Carmilla had anything to say about it. Who the hell likes the taste of tequila?

“There aren’t any zombies or whatever you think is coming out of these well-maintained and lovely graves, I promise,” Carmilla called forward to Laura though she grinned at Danny.

Danny snorted at the search for approval crossed Carmilla’s face. She nodded, yes, that was totally respectful to the person lying six feet underneath your super deep combat boots. Close enough for Carmilla anyway.

Laura froze up ahead. “Zombies are real?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re, like, a thousand years old and very well travelled!”

“I’m starting to think you have a thing for older women,” Danny mused, mostly to herself. Laura had confessed to having a crush on a female teacher for more years at school than the years she didn’t. “And if zombies are real, then I demand money from someone. Don’t remember who, probably Perry.”

Carmilla attached herself to Danny’s side while Laura tried to consolidate her worldview into one that involved zombies too.

“No more Perry,” she decreed through a blood-drunk haze. Danny slung her arm over the vampire’s shoulders, reminding herself to bring that one up when Carmilla was sober again.

“We have to check the mausoleum, get back to the bar before we’re missed, and then we can go home and discuss the bottle of whisky I know is hidden in the bottom drawer of my desk,” Laura reasoned out. Carmilla’s bleary eyes regarded her as if she was asking her to move mountains while Danny was frowning, like she had been since they left the warm bar in the first place. “What now, Lawrence?”

“When I can think properly, we are having a long talk about why I was totally expecting you to suggest mausoleum sex for a second there.”

“No,” Carmilla said with complete maturity and not like an angry toddler.

“Really?”

“Laura, you’ve invaded five classrooms, two lecture halls, and no less than seven personal offices, this is not the most ridiculous thing you’ve suggested.”

“Maybe no Laura?” Carmilla asked mostly herself.


	60. Chapter 60

The child was barely older than sixteen. Mother had done a number on the girl, and Carmilla wanted to revive her and kill her all over again. The girl believed in every word Mother fed her, the cult, the fantastic life of the vampire menace, and the inevitable plan to take over Europe then the world in the amazing service of a demi-god.

“I will escape and the great power will be appeased by my offerings,” the kid spat around her bloody lips. The chains barely held her immense strength, the bolts cracking the cement of the wall around them. Laura leapt back in shock while Danny only folded her arms, leaning against the wall with a nonchalance that was entirely false. Carmilla could hear her heart racing along.

“You will stay right here until we can find a vampire therapist for you, or something,” she finished lamely. Carmilla never had the beautiful grasp on words of her Laura or her Danny. Taking care of Mother’s fallout seemed to take forever. Three years later and there was still new problems to be dealt with, new junk that was essentially her problem because there was no one else. Laura and Danny were only going to get themselves killed if she left them to it.

“You are a traitor to the cause and I will put you down like the dog you are,” the girl snarled back at her. Carmilla sighed and considered shifting form for a delightful moment. Ripping her throat out with her teeth sounded fantastic. Anything was better than babysitting the crazy.

“She’s a cat,” Laura pointed out quickly, and only Danny found it funny. Carmilla couldn’t decide if it was annoying or funny. “A big, scary, not at all cuddly cat.”

Annoying. Undermining. Adorable. Unbelievable.

“You stay here and think about what you’re wanting to do with your afterlife that doesn’t involve sacrificing people to a big ole fish thing.”

Carmilla glared in what she hoped was a older sibling, role model kind of way and turned to leave.

“You drink from your slaves, why not just sacrifice them for your own power?”

Danny kept silent, impassive glare staying steady. Laura spluttered around her words. Carmilla...

Charging, muscles against muscles. Carmilla slammed the new vampire into the wall, sending chips flying and dark cracks emerging from around the collision. Carmilla elbowed her in the jaw, using her superior strength to break bones cleanly. The kid’s femur snapped with a well-placed boot. Danny still didn’t move, Laura still didn’t know what to say.

“You say another word about them and I will tear you limb from limb with my bare hands,” she growled as she held the newborn by the throat, crushing her trachea beneath her hand.

“Mother loved you so much, her perfect little monster.”

Danny pushed off the wall with her foot. Gently, she prised Carmilla away from the young one, Laura coming up to take Carmilla into her arms.

Danny pulled her machete from its holster and cut off the young one’s head in one clean movement.

“No need for threats.”


	61. Chapter 61

Laura Hollis had no doubt that her girls were the only reason she was alive to see the age of twenty-five. Strangely, neither of them had much to do with the constant mess of danger Laura was constantly throwing herself into, though they did help. Laura felt she could have survived those incidents without trouble without them, the day to day stuff on the other hand:

That was the potentially fatal problem.

Laura forgot to eat, denied herself sleep, and had a real issue with keeping her attention on the road while she was driving.

For Carmilla, keeping her idiot Cupcake alive was a series of gentle nudges in the right direction with varying degrees of intensity.

Carmilla was a guiding hand on the small of her back when they were crossing a road while Laura was going on at length about whatever held her interest that week. Then she was dead weight on Laura at three in the damn morning when she had a cookie craving her stomach would punish her for in the daylight hours. Demanding physical contact was a selfless act of girlfriend duties that generally led to an asleep Laura by the end of Carmilla’s snuggles, and was certainly not Carmilla being a generally cuddly person when given the right company. Carmilla denied all knowledge of having researched how long a person could go without sleep without suffering serious consequences.

Laura got an average of six hours of sleep per night and Carmilla was a damn smug kitty when Danny was around for Laura’s sleep by snuggle attacks.

For Danny, she did her very best Carmilla impression.

This meant bringing Laura things Danny felt she couldn’t hunt down for herself. She even endured a pile of jokes from Perry about half-dead rats on doorsteps.

Danny brought fruits, vegetables, and other necessary nutrients for continuing to live a long and healthy life so Danny didn’t have to mourn her girlfriend dying via scurvy at age thirty.

When winter finally arrived and snow was blanketing their neighbourhood, Danny suddenly found an amazing heavy coat in the back of her closet from when she was like twelve and wouldn’t it fit Laura’s skinny, tiny, easily-chilled body perfectly?

Danny drove them everywhere, side-stepping Laura’s easily distracted nature smoothly by selling Carmilla on the idea that lounging in the back was much better than riding shotgun. Also, she got to share fond smiles in the rear view mirror with Danny over their Laura.

What they tended not to notice was Laura being much more subtle about her caring, because they were stubborn and dense sometimes.

Carmilla was carefully pushed into getting out of the house and her own mind on a weekly basis. Laura had watched depression happen to her father and she was going to fight better now she was grown.

Danny was dragged to an obscenely sugar-filled date once per month that put their pie dates to shame. Laura knew damn well that she wasn’t rewarding herself properly for all her hard work.

They kept her alive, she helped them live.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With Imaginary Devils closing in on 10k views (which is an insane number to me), I'm going to write a new one to three-shot and I wanted to ask if anyone had anything in that series that they want expanded on.


	62. Chapter 62

They tried to see the sights in the United Kingdom, they really, really did.

Carmilla wanted to tell them what had changed since she was last here between World Wars. Danny liked the rain. Laura nursed a quiet obsession with all things British that worried her girls with how idealistic her view was.

First, the hotel bed was big and soft. Carmilla didn’t listen to one word of argument when it came to how much money she was allowed to spend on the room alone. Laura was insistent that they weren’t going to spend any time in the hotel anyway, so therefore they should get something cheap and practical.

Danny, shocking both of them, decided that carrying Carmilla to what felt like the most expensive bed in the world and throwing her down on it was the single best use of her time since she decided well-defined guns would be like catnip to her non-cat girlfriend.

For the record, Laura Hollis actually drooled, and no one would ever let her forget it.

With Danny distracting Carmilla, Laura decided join in and their first day and a half was gone. Then the start of day three was lost to exhaustion. Technically there was nearly zero chance of people bursting through the door, so it wasn’t an opportunity to miss.

Then, it was Carmilla and a decidedly feline hesitance to go out in the rain.

“Giving me this kind of ammunition makes it seem very, very real to me here Laura,” Danny argued on Carmilla’s side of the ‘stay inside or go out’ discussion.

“You just want to continue with the marathon you’re angling for, and you’ve somehow convinced Carmilla to go along with it,” countered Laura, making her girlfriends feel great.

“We’ll go out for dinner,” Carmilla broke into their little chat, leaning against the bedroom doorway. Naked. “Now, come back to bed, the pair of you.”

Day three ended with exactly one nice dinner. Days four through seven were taken up with a long winded, and inevitably self-destructive ‘discussion’ surrounding Doctor Who.

Danny wanted nothing to do with the war that ensued. She barely watched it when Laura had it on and did not want to go up against Carmilla’s surprisingly passionate defence of the original version of the series. Clearly the solution to being left out of the friendly chat was to lounge around in various states of undress while wondering what the almighty hell the fancy food menu meant and struggling to understand local reality television without Laura there to make up stories and Carmilla mocking absolutely every part of the production.

“Please stop arguing over numbers or whatever and come watch this crap with me,” Danny called from the couch into the honeymoon-sized bedroom. “We have to be up early for the flight and I don’t care if there’s over fifty years of history, you can’t spend more than three days fighting about it!”

Laura blinked as if she wasn’t aware of the passage of time.

“They have lovely penthouse suites here, did not have that last time,” Carmilla noted in the airport the next morning.


	63. Chapter 63

Laura hitting her head while falling down a set of stairs in the middle of a sugar high won a dormitory wide bet for the wendigo living on the roof. It also won Carmilla a month-long argument with Danny.

Danny held her head in one hand as she drove them to the hospital. Carmilla had Laura’s head resting in her lap in the backseat, frowning over the dried blood in her hair.

The hospital was close and relatively quick in seeing Laura, so Danny didn’t have to get annoyed with the nice people just doing their jobs. Carmilla was briefly distracted by a pathologist walking by pushing what Danny presumed to be donated blood, but Laura waking up swiftly distracted her.

“Who’r’ou?” Laura slurred, she had to be put under to release pressure on her brain. The anaesthesiologist warned them that she might be a bit loopy due to the various things being pumped into her veins, but not knowing who either of them were was a great deal more than ‘she might be a tad confused’.

“I don’t know how to respond to that,” Danny broke the silence first, slumping back in her chair. Laura’s head rose to get a better look at all six feet of the strange ginger woman who was at her hospital bedside. Laura decided she must be some sort of social worker or something.

“Very helpful, Stretch,” the other unreasonably attractive woman at Laura’s bedside said fondly. “I’m Carmilla and that idiot is Fido.”

“Kitty, why must you wound me so?” Laura’s bleary eyes darted between the two of them. “Danny Lawrence.”

“Why are you here?” Laura now thought they might be coworkers or classmates, her father would be along shortly, probably.

“Support? General concern for your well-being? Xena, help,” the woman with a downright attractive leather jacket on answered, kind of.

“Xena?” The ginger stood and flicked the other one on the ear.

“We’re here because we care about you, Laura. You hit your head and now you’re out of it,” the tall one explained warmly, her eyes betraying a great deal of affection.

Oh, Danny was her girlfriend. Or a really concerned best friend. Hopefully.

“And we promise to never buy your affections with sugary treats ever again because while you have a cast-iron liver, you have no tolerance for the sugar high,” Carmilla added, confusing Laura further.

“You’re really pretty, and please tell me we aren’t in-laws or something, and why are you both buying my affections?”

“We’re dating,” Carmilla threw out before poking Danny in the stomach, “told you we should have given her a helmet.”

Laura’s heart fell, “oh.”

Danny’s eyes narrowed on her while she held a finger up to indicate that she would be dealing with Carmilla later. “You, Laura. We’re both dating you.”

“And each other,” Carmilla added, dragging Danny’s arms around her. “Because you’re a stubborn thing who decided two girlfriends was a great idea and so is stair surfing.”

Laura nodded solemnly. “I am awesome.”


	64. Chapter 64

Neither Danny nor Carmilla noticed her getting home from classes. If they did then they would have sprung apart so fast someone could put a reasonable dent in the wall. Laura ducked quickly into the dorm room, closing the door quietly behind her so they would continue to not notice her. It wasn’t often that Laura got to indulge herself and it wasn’t a conversation she could see either of them sitting down to for at least another couple of months in their experimental relationship.

They had managed to communicate to her that neither of them were opposed to the idea, they just got all embarrassed if they were going to set out to do it in the first place.

Laura took a solid week to understand their positions on the subject, their mutual self-consciousness a foreign concept to her. Papa was very open with his ‘talk’ and he brought as much formally published information as a man with a Goggle search engine and a library card could possibly bring. Three hundred years of experience and being queer woman catnip didn’t guarantee a well-rounded education on all things bedroom related. A fact Laura learnt every time she brought up something new she was interested in.

It didn’t take long for Carmilla to break far enough away from Danny to notice that Laura was leaning heavily on the door for support as she watched them with an intensity unmatched in any other arena. The vampire blinked twice and got right back to it without otherwise acknowledging that she’d even seen Laura. Danny remained oblivious though Laura was deeply interested in a discussion as to why exactly the generally uber-submissive Danny was doing most of the work and pressing the issue forward.

That was different.

Laura wondered how much of their sex life was altered by her presence. She had always been curious to see who, if anyone, came out on top when she wasn’t involved. It was certainly Laura in all three of the other combination options and she didn’t even do it consciously unless she was having a particularly bad day then the power trip did wonders for her mood.

Danny tossed a bra off to the side and Laura’s arm reflexively extended to catch it, stopping whatever noise Danny was expecting to not happen. Great, now they were both aware she was there and Danny promptly froze in place, eliciting a desperate whine from the vampire beneath her.

“You haven’t ever noticed me slipping in until you were done, have you?” Laura asked the collective silence suddenly introduced into the dorm room.

Danny whined this time, Carmilla helpfully pulling her girlfriend’s face into her neck to allow her a place to hide.

“There are three options,” Laura began, not noticing her boss voice slipping on, “first we can stop dead right here and we never speak of this again. Next we have I leave and I forget this ever happened. Finally, you get back to work, Lawrence, or Carmilla might explode.”

Laura leaned back in her desk chair and awaited their answer.


	65. Chapter 65

Laura sat on the roof of their apartment building, unlit firework in one hand, fruity vodka drink in the other. There were no stars in the sky, light pollution drowning them out so badly that they had to take monthly trips out into the wilderness to sate Carmilla’s need for brooding against beautiful backgrounds and Danny’s desire to run free and wild in the middle of nowhere.

“Can we not explode a hand off in the pursuit of pretty colours?” Danny whined around her orange juice featuring more gin than Laura could drink in a night. She hated how alcohol tolerance increased with size. “I vote the vampire handles the explosives.”

Carmilla groaned form her position on the floor. The Bloody Mary’s featured more blood than generally served and she had drank herself to hammered before the sun even set.

“Maybe not the best idea right now,” Laura said while she flipped the firework idly in her hand and took a long drink from her bottle. She wasn’t going to catch Carmilla, but she was determined to match Danny at least for once. “Do you want to light it?”

Danny shook her head, holding open her arms for Laura to curl up in her lap while Carmilla continued her confused study of the starless sky above. “I want cuddles and I will not settle for explosions instead.”

“Where did the stars go?”

Laura burrowed into Danny’s heavy coat to fight off the chill she pretended to be suffering under and rolled her eyes at her other girlfriend. “They’re taking a well-earned break right now, keep watch for them to come back please?”

Danny pinched her arm, frowning at Laura’s mocking of the drunken vampire. “Be nice.”

“Laura’s always nice except when she isn’t,” Carmilla paused for whatever reason her addled brain could come up with, “then she’s very, very mean.”

Laura hid her giggles in Danny’s neck.

“You sure you don’t want to head inside? Maybe get into bed?” Danny called out. Laura was suddenly very suspicious of the supposed amount of gin in her orange juice. She reached out to take a sip and it was perfectly orange-y and not at all gin-y. “I stopped putting the gin in like an hour ago, Hollis. Keep up.”

“I thought I was, now I must declare victory,” Laura informed her girlfriend with a condescending kiss on the tip of Danny’s nose. She was going for condescending, anyway. Results may vary.

“You may declare second place,” Danny argued, tilting her head toward Carmilla’s shaking attempts at standing. “I have plenty of lap, Mary.”

Carmilla scowled darkly at the name, but stumbled over to strain Danny’s chair with the weight of all three of them.

“Well if everyone’s doing it,” she grumbled as her legs tangled with Laura’s. “It’s cold and there’s no stars and when’s midnight so there can be kissing?”

Danny let her head fall back and laughed from really deep down.

“Around an hour ago, you poor drunk idiots.”


	66. Chapter 66

The Silas University Library was not a place to be if you weren’t perfectly comfortable with the people you were functionally spelunking with.

Laura put on her brave pants that looked nothing like Danny’s rainbow collection at all, and got to hunting down her two ridiculous girlfriends after the third day they were missing. Even the most relaxed of students started to get worried after any longer than forty-eight hours without any contact.

She successfully navigated the stacks for a solid hour before she heard signs of relatively human life.

“I don’t know how, but this is somehow your fault, Xena,” came Carmilla’s voice off to Laura’s left. Though it was more fondly annoyed than usual, a worrying detail that had Laura breaking into a jog. If they were being nice to each other willingly then something had gone seriously wrong and serious action was required. “Maybe your overwhelming love and affection for me gave it ideas.”

Laura stopped dead. Carmilla’s voice was almost close enough to put her in risk of being heard by them both. She resumed movement with slow and careful steps, patience was demanded when there was potential for embarrassing stories to tell LaFontaine and Perry.

“Oh no, that thing very clearly says the feeling has to be mutual or the stupid-ass magic or whatever wouldn’t even work!”

Laura closed her eyes and internally jumped for joy. Maybe the tiresome bickering over her would stop if they could channel their energy into something more productive. She kept creeping along, having to see whatever they had been occupied with for three days straight.

“It’s not magic, I don’t think,” Carmilla argued fruitlessly. “It’s only been like an hour, give it another two days and Laura will be rousing a cavalry of some sort to come do her hero thing.”

An hour? Definitely magic, Laura concluded as she peeked around the next corner and caught sight of her girlfriends locked in a fairly comfortable embrace in the middle of a glowing circle surrounded by floating symbols that Laura didn’t recognise. Laura wondered how time dilation worked on such a small scale, but left that for her monthly Magic VS Physics argument with Kirsch.

“Are you blind or is this some kind of vampire trap that you can’t see?” Danny adjusted them, which amounted to shifting Carmilla from her lap to slightly less totally in her lap. The vampire did not seem pleased by the change, pouting. “Oh stop, I won’t tell anyone if you want to keep this whole thing private.”

“We promised Laura to be completely honest with her about our feelings,” Carmilla said, moving to bury her face in Danny’s neck.

“Laura’s fine with it so long as she gets to take pictures of you two freaking dumb idiots,” Laura interjected, moving into the open so her lethargic girlfriends could see her properly. Carmilla squirmed until she lost all contact with Danny. “Hey! None of that, go back to cuddling while I get my camera out. No one is going to believe me without proof.”


	67. Chapter 67

Strength training was always a more peaceful experience to Danny. Cardio ended with her blood thundering through her ears and her audio book drowned out for half the workout. Horribly counter-productive to keeping up with the voracious reading pace Carmilla set. She would not be beaten by a vampire and Laura had bowed out a little too easily. Danny was a competitive person and this was one realm where she could possibly beat Carmilla without her sulking after defeat.

Given the life her sense of justice and weakness for adorable journalism majors had her leading, being able to hold herself up for long periods of time was a vital skill to have.

The Silas Western Gym Complex involved a lava based rock climbing wall with the most effective incentive ever, a pool that periodically heated to the point of boiling, and perfectly well-maintained actual gym that this far hadn’t shown any signs of weirdness.

The rhythm of up, hold, down, kept her sane while an ancient Greek tragedy played in her ears.

Arms begging for a break, Danny succumbed to to the pain. She dropped to the ground and stopped her audio book while she did her warm down stretches.

Danny turned to have her ‘I’m dating a vampire and showering at the gym is very important when super-senses were in play’ shower and almost tripped over one Laura Hollis with her nose buried in some long book that Danny was sure Laura didn’t actually own.

Danny folded her arms and waited for Laura to notice.

It took nearly ten minutes. Danny had time to complete her routine and wipe the excess sweat off herself before Laura looked up.

“Hi?”

“Hello, why are you here? You attract trouble and this is the only normal gym left on campus and you’re dealing with Carmilla’s complaining if I’m forced to work out in our apartment,” Danny rambled instead of a proper greeting. Laura flushed bright red, trying to hide the clearly Russian brick of a book from her girlfriend.

Danny sighed, collapsing onto the bench next to Laura and ignoring Laura’s appreciative staring at her glistening body.

“How far ahead of us are you?”

“How dare you! This is for class and is not the seventy-fourth book I’ve read thus far this year,” Laura defended herself with a growing smirk.

“It’s freaking August, Hollis!” Danny nudged Laura until the smaller woman was on the precipice of falling off the bench. “I am going to take a shower and then we are coming back to this possibly via Skype with Fangface.”

“That’s like, three more than you both put together, or did you finish whatever you’re listening to while maintaining yourself?”

Smug Laura was utterly unbearable and Danny considered flopping her sweat-drenched hair all over her smug damn face.

“This is why you aren’t allowed to play team sports,” Danny informed the smirking asshole while flicking her hair over Laura’s face.

“Danny!” Laura squealed. “You sore loser pain in the neck. No team sports for you either!”


	68. Chapter 68

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is technically the second earliest story chronologically in We Three Idiots. I plan to expand on the whole Hollstein adding Hollence story over the next month.

Carmilla sat outside the emergency department with her head leaning against the cold wall and her ears trained on the familiar galloping heartbeat of one Laura Hollis in a full-flight panic.

Panic. Yet excited.

Carmilla had to literally come back from death to get Laura’s heart going like that. She supposed the giant came as close as a person could to death without actually dying.

The werewolves were rogue and without a pack. Carmilla understood what being alone sounded like and those pups weren’t happy and cosy in their regular lives. The Salazar pack from Portugal would no doubt be getting involved moving forward if the Guerrero family from Spain didn’t get to Silas first. They had taken responsibility for their kind throughout Europe before Carmilla was born and they took that job seriously.

An attack on a school, regardless of how odd Silas was in general, could not be overlooked.

Laura was breathing heavily and Carmilla sprang to her feet when light footsteps made for the door outside of Danny’s private room. The scent of blood flowed out of the room, intoxicating, delectable blood that demanded Carmilla try to consume. The solitary few drops of Laura’s blood she stole didn’t taste as good as Lawrence and Carmilla couldn’t even taste it. Yet, her mind supplied only to be suppressed viciously.

The door opened and there was Laura, her hands still stained with Lawrence blood from the initial wounds. Carmilla had no idea how to react and hoped Laura knew what she needed.

“I don’t think the Summer Society is going to like having a werewolf lead them next year,” Laura said in a monotone that threatened to turn bitter at any moment.

“That is not how werewolves work,” replied Carmilla reflexively. She had spent decades in classes arguing from a position of superior knowledge about everything from angels to zombies, she knew werewolves. “It’s like blue eyes, random mutation that’s passed down genetically, you can’t catch werewolf or blue eyes.”

Carmilla was busy looking at anything but Laura’s bloody hands so she missed the curious stare Laura gave her.

“She’s going to be okay?” Laura sounded tiny and Carmilla wanted to lie.

“If she survives the night, then probably,” she couldn’t lie, not about this, “her back is going to be a horror show once it heals. Those are some deep scratches she’s got there.”

Xena saved Laura, and nearly got herself killed doing her hero thing.

Carmilla was blocking the possible reason for Laura’s still racing heart. It hurt too much and Laura already made her choices, dammit!

“She was almost gone,” Laura sounded a million miles away. “I almost lost her.”

Carmilla wanted to run away. She wasn’t going to stand around and watch Laura be swayed away from her.

“I can lose either of you,” now Laura’s words turned angry. Like being mad at Mother and the wolves would make them stop trying to take them. “I won’t.”

“Either there’s a padded room in the near future or-?”

“I can’t keep pretending the feelings aren’t still there.”

Oh. That.


	69. Chapter 69

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another entry into We Three Idiots set the night before Danny graduates from Silas. Again, will be expanded on once I sort out my continuity.

Danny Lawrence wasn’t going to graduate top of her class or with any significant academic achievement. There simply wasn’t time for it with her busy schedule. The campus was perpetually under siege from one enemy or another. She was dating a budding journalist and a generally apathetic vampire. The Summer Society needed someone with real power to bring them in from essentially devolving into a pack of wild girls with exactly zero restraint.

The bar on the roof of the Applied Chemistry building was student run with exclusively student patrons. If the staff knew about it, then they were letting it continue due to the annual death toll from idiotic drunken ideas being tried on top of a building with a fatal drop on all seven sides. Danny stopped the suicidally drunk people when she was there but had little interest in playing moral police if they only people they were hurting continued to be themselves.

Danny had enough problems without adding that kind of responsibility to her day.

She sighed, wondering when her admitted saving people thing got so out of alignment. Carmilla was keenly aware that her outlook on human lives was significantly different than either Laura or Danny and made sure to keep her influence away from them on the subject. Danny rubbed at her tired eyes when it became clear that the desire to sit back and do nothing was entirely of her own making. With no greater purpose to work toward, like surviving Silas through graduation, Danny was useless for all intents and purposes.

The sour cocktail slid down her throat with a burn that betrayed the stupidly high alcohol content. A body came to rest next to her, and Danny mused that if it was Kirsch then she was beating him to death with her bare hands, no matter what kind of fight he put up. This desire to insight fear into the hearts of everyone around her battled with an internal voice that demanded to grab her sword and get to stabbing.

Danny blamed both voices on the drink and asked the Goddess to grant her a reprieve when she decked the owner of the odious body spray polluting her senses.

“You as nervous as me?” Danny rolled her eyes. The Valedictorian himself was deigning to speak with her, fantastic. “The Club and I are doing great deals on anti-anxiety and super-focus shots, if you’re interested?”

Danny lifted her head from its resting place on her hand. “Casey, I wouldn’t buy the cure for cancer off you if my grandmother was so riddled with the stuff that even her hair turned black and died.”

Casey Kirkland was the Head of the Alchemy Club, a fact he was very willing to tell anyone that passed his field of view. Danny wished he drank so he could be one of the idiots falling off the Applied Chemistry building.

“You sure?” Kirkland continued with his pitch, “we have a special deal, stay eternally young for your vampire whor-”

Danny broke his jaw before he could finish.


	70. Chapter 70

“How could this ever be considered a sport?” Laura chucked into the pleasant silence of their living room. A beat. Two sets of eyes staring at her with different types of incredulity. “What?”

Like she didn’t ask hoping to provoke an argument.

Carmilla caved first, “a lot of sports aren’t the most physically demanding. I fail to see how practising for shooting is any different and chess has a direct opponent rather than some ridiculous points system.”

Danny was more direct, “so, Scrabble’s a sport too?”

Laura sat back in her chair and waited for her sound thrashing at Carmilla’s hands was totally forgotten. Sore loser didn’t quite cover it.

“Scrabble is an exercise in linguistic discrimination,” Carmilla snapped.

Bad move from the vampire, Laura commentated to herself. Laura loved when they tipped over from angry fighting to passionate arguing, though she couldn’t pinpoint when exactly.

“It would be a terrible addition to the Olympics, very discriminatory. Not a damn sport.” Somehow a worse move, Laura let her head fall into her hand.

Cat-like wasn’t a term thrown around in their house often for reasons of the couch not being super comfortable for three people when the kitty cracked and needed cuddles. Yet it was the relevant one as Carmilla slipped out of her chair and moved to straddle Danny’s lap in her reading armchair. Danny put her book aside and Laura internally whooped at a job well done.

“Please, I beg you to defend sculpture and poetry and javelin without a target as sports,” she purred, sitting back far enough that Danny knew exactly how still her hands were going to stay. “There’s an objective winner and an objective loser in chess and no one needs a dictionary to determine the validity of a move.”

Laura generally considered using one’s chest to win an argument to be stacking the deck and tossed the thought out immediately each and every time. She reached out to start packing up the half-finished game she was playing with Carmilla.

“Touch it and I’m teaching you how to throw a javelin in the morning,” Danny threatened without taking her eyes off Carmilla. Laura folded her arms and wondered where the heck Danny planned to get a serviceable javelin on such short notice. “Chess isn’t a sport and I can prove it.”

“Oh?” Carmilla bit hard on Danny’s seeming over-confidence. Danny just smirked.

“Hey, Laura?” Danny called to Carmilla’s immediate glare and huffy pouting. Which lost all its strength as she was sitting in Danny’s lap.

“Uh, yeah?”

“What were you, Laura Hollis, doing a minute ago?”

Carmilla silently fumed. Laura was confused.

“Considering how to get out of losing to Carmilla, again,” she answered, awaiting her swift and hopefully merciful judgement.

“Before that,” Danny clarified, letting her head hit the back of her chair. Carmilla reached up to trace the muscles newly exposed.

“Losing to Carmilla at chess,” she admitted, sour at a brilliant plan ruined.

“Laura plays it, therefore, not a sport.”

“Hey!”


	71. Chapter 71

Laura pulled the Guard Captain’s cloak around her body while the raider woman scouted up ahead. Her sworn protector had shut up real good after blushing for an impressive period of time. Morgan’s daughter had left them in an uncomfortable silence.

“There’s an abandoned fort a few hours from the castle, we should be nearly there,” Guard Captain Lawrence broke the tension with her usual sledgehammer of subtlety. Laura spent years in her father’s castle admiring the way the older woman dealt with the people around the Princess. Suitors, trade representatives, and members of the King’s Council were all turned away with blunt words backed up by a heavy sword.

Laura quietly contemplated whether to trust this woman any longer. Sure, there was the small matter of her little, tiny, not at all serious crush on her, but the raiders weren’t known for their disloyalty. Laura couldn’t imagine a world where the brave and true Guard Captain would fall for such a obvious lie. It had to be a lie, Laura decided, mostly to protect herself.

There was a flurry of movement up ahead and a shout of the Guard Captain’s name. Danny reacted almost quickly enough to save her arm but the beast Carmilla warned against was latched onto Danny’s forearm with an impressively powerful bite.

Laura thought it was a wolf, then shook herself free of the very much not the point observation.

The raider was back in their sight in a flash, throwing knife released and lodged firmly in the beast’s neck.

Laura barely had time to breath before her Guard Captain was on the ground with a much larger threat than any beast looming over her wounded body. Morgan’s daughter was stabbing the beast to death with one hand even as the other came to closely examine Danny’s wounds. Laura had never felt more out-classed and useless.

“It’s fine, you’re going to send yourself grey with all the worrying you do over me,” the Guard Captain growled, using her superior size to stand as if there wasn’t a trained killer attached to her front. Laura wondered if either of them remembered she was even there. “Can you tell the Princess how far we are from shelter?”

The raider struggled until she was free and back on her own two feet, “really?”

Danny shrugged. “You know these woods better than I do.”

They stared at each other for three drops of Danny’s blood falling to the ground.

“Sooner we get there, the sooner I can tend properly to her wound,” Laura interjected when it looked like the raider was going to argue some more. Laura hated the tug of affection she felt over the Guard Captain still, how she longed for the sure and borderline indecent hand on her lower back. Over the past year she had dreams of being stolen into Lawrence’s arms, a forbidden act under her father’s nose.

Now, Laura watched the dopey grin she fell for grin at one of Morgan’s children.

She missed the speculative stare from said child, and the cocky smirked that followed.


	72. Chapter 72

When Laura got sick, she was down for a day, maybe two, and then she was fine. Carmilla didn’t get sick, ever.

Danny Lawrence got debilitating sick. Man-flu had nothing on Danny Lawrence with a particularly harsh cold.

Initially, Carmilla diagnosed her with some kind of severe influenza and considered burning Danny and absolutely everything in the apartment with her. She’d seen bad diseases rip through society and decimate populations and there was no way she was letting it happen again.

Laura had to sit her down and explain the alternate strain of man-flu she was officially declaring ‘healthy person pneumonia’. Then she had to stop Carmilla from rushing to Danny’s side in her death throes.

“Hospitals with sterilisation and hand washing are a thing now, most things are survivable and she’s being a massive baby anyway,” she managed to get out before Carmilla broke free of her comparatively feeble hold. “How have you not noticed modern medicine progressing?”

Carmilla froze, “it’s not relevant to my interests.”

“She’s not dying, she’s not used to being sick. Because she’s a generally healthy person with decent natural immunity and all that witchcraft,” Laura explained as she shuffled her restraining hold into a comforting hug. Carmilla relaxed.

“She’s acting like she’s dying,” Carmilla grumbled, pouting even while she wrapped her arms around Laura and snuggled in closer. “You don’t act like you’re dying when you get sick.”

“I don’t eat more than the daily recommended fruit and vegetable serving, nor do I spend more than no time at the gym each day. These kinds of things tend to stop minor things like colds and the flu from bothering a person.”

“Like how you think each and every scratch and scrape you get is the end of the world and Xena thinks a broken finger is something that you can live with for a few days before seeing a damn doctor?”

“Yes, like that,” Laura confirmed with a whine. She did not overreact to injuries. Laura was perfectly aware of how badly an untreated wound could end up if left alone to fester and realign broken bones incorrectly. “Although it’s a miracle Danny didn’t do permanent damage to her hand leaving it for so long.”

“What do we do?” Carmilla asked with a herculean effort to admit she didn’t know everything about everything. “Because I’m still in favour of just burning everything.”

Laura untangled them and dragged Carmilla by the hand into their little kitchen. “First, we don’t burn anything because this isn’t the freaking plague-”

“There was more than one plague and I don’t believe that you know which one’s which.”

“Secondly, you go out any buy the nicest tissues you can find while I make some soup because her throat is probably the only thing that hurts as bad as she says it does and warm liquids are important for soothing that kind of pain.”

“Is this some ‘being a person’ class I missed in school?”

Laura shrugged, “my Dad prepared me for life, a lot of that is knowing how to deal with a sore throat and the sniffles.”


	73. Chapter 73

Ever seen a cat in a hospital?

They spend all of their time investigating strange smells and sounds, quickly followed by a swift declaration of disgust at everything they can see and everything they can’t. Then they promptly get bored and fall asleep in the warm imaging room.

Laura needed her appendix out. Not desperately, she wasn’t going to explode. Their local doctor was covering her bases and taking every precaution. Light pain and a slight enlargement was enough to sent all three of them to hospital for an afternoon surgery.

Danny was out late the previous night on an emergency call and was slouched down in the uncomfortable waiting room chair fast asleep, to the endless amazement of her partners.

“This is the second most uncomfortable chair I have ever sat in. How is she asleep?” Laura asked Carmilla who answered with an undignified snort. “Is there such a thing as vampire allergies?”

The on-duty nurse for the Surgical Department stared at them from behind his high reception desk. Laura was very comfortable in her gown and high traction socks, wiggling her toes every now and then to feel the plastic squishing between them. She wasn’t comfortable enough to sleep nor was the prevailing scent of hyper clean bothering her to the point of near hay fever.

“My nose isn’t build for a chemical heavy environment like yours are,” Carmilla defended herself around her blocked nose, causing Laura to hide a smile behind her hand as the vampire sneezed. Danny barely stirred, continuing to confound both of them. “Shut up, Cupcake.”

“Didn’t say a word.”

Carmilla grumbled to herself as she also slouched in her chair to take advantage of Laura’s free shoulder. “It’s abrasive and there’s a whole bunch of beeping noises that probably mean someone’s dying somewhere, and why wouldn’t you let me buy some surgeon’s downtime and like, rent out a ward so this crap doesn’t happen?”

“That is the single most wasteful solution to a problem you’ve had since deciding the best way to fit Danny into our dorm room was to privately buy the building and start knocking down walls. There was magic asbestos in there, and I don’t want to think about what that’s done to my lungs!”

“Have you tried breathing underwater?” Danny suggested groggily, not moving her head from the warm Laura shoulder she’d claimed an hour ago. “Perry can totally breath underwater now, and I don’t understand why.”

“You could have two whole extra appendixes, appendices?” Carmilla stopped to consider pluralities while Danny gave in to her aching neck and stood up.

“Can you not do the stretching thing? I am already aware you’re taller then me, that’s just showing off,” Laura whined as a stab of pain hit down near her right hip. Danny ignored her while reaching for the ceiling.

“Even the blood being taken smells wrong,” Carmilla continued with her less than stellar assessment of the hospital, “also, why is it freezing in here and is there a warm place to go?”


	74. Chapter 74

The skies above them went dark as if by magic.

“If there’s a fucking tentacle monster thing here, I am never speaking to either of you again,” Danny promised when Laura and Carmilla turned their brilliantly triumphant grins on the point directly ahead of them.

There wasn’t anything there per say, it was just more ocean and they only knew they were closing in on their destination due to the GPS system and Carmilla’s alarmingly accurate readings of the sun and the stars.

“How have you not read any Lovecraft, Lawrence?” Laura called over the wind which had been steadily picking up the closer they got to Point Nemo.

“It’s probably some eternally damned, pissed off oceanic spirit or some old god of an abandoned religion or cult having a tantrum because no one’s paying attention to them anymore,” added Carmilla, barely concerned by the rising swell and the first drops of rain. “We’ll stop here and I’ll go down and check it out before we go any further. You know, just in case.”

“Of big scary monster thing?” Danny lightly mocked the very idea even as the water wasn’t behaving as if there was inclement weather on the way. Perhaps there was just a whole bunch of whales in the area and they had all decided to go for a quick speed test in one hulking mass underneath the water.

That was likely.

“Do we have a plan if it is real and angry?” Danny threw out as Carmilla was preparing to plunge into the blackness of the ocean.

“Run away,” was all Carmilla said before diving into the water.

“We are all going to die here because you read a damn book. Are we going to the centre of the planet next? Hot air balloon ride featuring more trains than one would expect?”

“I’m willing to put money and/or chores on it being some weird-ass volcanic activity,” Laura shrugged, well aware of the real reason why they’d bought a big damn boat to go hunting for Lovecraft’s most famous creation. “And if there is a god down there, won’t you be happier knowing about it?”

Danny threw a broken compass at her, snorting when Laura nearly slipped over dodging it. “No, I will not be happier. Despite the obvious benefits to the situation, I don’t really like vampires and harpies and alchemy as a concept being real, forget ancient demi-gods and whatever the fuck is down there.”

“But you like the vampire,” Laura pointed out, ducking behind a chair to escape Danny’s half-hearted annoyance. “Worst case: we get to be together when she wakes it up?”

Danny rolled her eyes and checked their positioning in relation to Point Nemo. She did some quick calculations to get how long, end of the world notwithstanding, it would take Carmilla to investigate and then get back up to them.

“She’s going to be down there for hours and she’s going to love it,” Laura cooed into Danny’s ear, hugging her from behind. “You know how much she loves going new places.”


	75. Chapter 75

The glove hit Danny square in the face and Laura was going to have to play crying significant other in a murder trial. Carmilla certainly wasn’t going to do it.

“Seriously?” Danny grabbed the wrist attached to the hands that held the glove with which she had been challenged to a duel. She turned to face Carmilla while twisting the man’s wrist sharply so he didn’t get any stabbing themed ideas. “Can you please have a normal ex for once? Ghost girl was one thing but Dorian Gray here is taking things a step to far into the insane territory.”

Said man, who looked remarkably barely post-pubescent for a man claiming to be the live Mircalla’s suitor, wasn’t impressive in the least. “Would you kindly release me madam!”

Danny twisted his wrist further and glared at him.

“Sorry, continue,” he whimpered, going pale.

“I have never seen him before,” Carmilla stated, audibly doubting herself as she said it. “I did not care enough to remember him at them time if we have met before.”

“That sounds much more likely,” Laura attempted a pacifying manoeuvre. The dude’s face was handsome in a deeply forgettable manner. “Danny, please let the deranged gentleman go so we can discuss duels to the death not being an accepted practise any more.”

Danny gave his wrist one last yank, eliciting a gasp of pain, and released him to scamper after his discarded glove. The pristine white fabric now had dirt all over it. “We are leaving the country and never coming back so this crap doesn’t happen again,” she declared, knowing that she’d probably need a murder charge handing over her head to convince Laura to leave the mystery heavy region.

“Count Whatever, are you aware any promises you were made regarding the technically deceased countess will have expired around the same time she did?” Laura asked, causing the gentleman’s face to lose the blush of rage blooming once he was away from the mean lady that worked some kind of witchcraft on his hand. “Follow up question: are you aware that you’re over three centuries old?”

He fainted.

“Taking that as a no on both then?”

“Laura,” Danny said in that warning tone that informed Laura she was getting carried away. Danny turned to Carmilla who was barely holding in her giggles. “I’m declaring this your problem, and if you don’t come up with something, then I’ll just do the damn duel and skewer him.”

“It’s his problem, he could just be a delusional man with a serious condition,” Carmilla argued against Danny washing her hands of it even as the challenged woman stormed back to their apartment to grab a sword with which to do the skewering. “We tie him up and see if someone comes looking for him, like a hospital-type-person.”

Laura nodded resolutely. “Do I get to interrogate him first?”

“Why?”

“I have to know if you were an awkward little lamb while you were alive and I can’t trust you to be honest!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This week in 'Me VS Editing': I don't update anything because I know it needs editing for continuity and I've given myself a four-front headache working that out.


	76. Chapter 76

Danny Lawrence was a reader, not a writer.

Creating a totally factual guide to the newly outed supernatural world was not something she set out to do. Not at all. Between Carmilla’s occasionally correct notations on dealing with the various other creatures she had encountered throughout her life and Laura’s series of investigative reports in the communities themselves, Danny had a mile of second hand experience. There was information to share and Laura’s reports weren’t exactly going to be required watching for elected officials and the general public.

“You’re going to be amazing!”

“You might not throw up!”

Laura and Carmilla along for ‘support’, of course.

“Or I run away and you two face the firing squad for me?” Danny suggested.

Carmilla had dramatically draped herself on the plush couch immediately upon entering the green room of the expensive political talk show the publisher decided Danny just had to appear on. Laura was just shy of actually bouncing off the walls with her excitement.

“Oh no you don’t! I fielded the most awkward phone call in history from my dad about us,” Laura waved her hand around so fast Danny was concerned about wrist damage, “you can deal with some failed politicians making fools of themselves on international television!”

Danny took all that in silently then turned to Carmilla with raised eyebrows.

“Do you think those are real blood packs on the snack table?” Carmilla was distracted, evidently. “Is that even legal? Animal blood generally doesn’t come in that kind of pack. Did these people knock over a blood drive?”

Really distracted.

Laura frowned, “the book does say not to provide your own blood willingly if you don’t absolutely trust the vampire in question, right?”

Danny wished Laura had any talent whatsoever with the written word. Great on camera and with the talking, couldn’t write a sonnet if she had a million monkeys at her disposal.

“You’ve gone through it seventeen times in the last month, Hollis,” Danny groaned. Seeing Austria was starting to feel like a bad deal given everything Silas had doled out on her. Turning to Carmilla, Danny answered, “that ‘Feed The Vampires’ charity donated it to the show and to the government for all official meetings.”

They both stopped to stare at her, amazed. Danny shrugged and sat in the overly comfortable chair, cradling her head in her hands.

“I have had phone calls from the people putting this crap together for weeks now,” she complained, eliciting a jump-start in Laura and Carmilla’s ‘noticing girlfriend is genuinely distressed’ senses. Which sucked. “They asked me if there’s a brand of aftershave vampires generally enjoy being around, for fuck’s sake.”

Laura hugged her close while Carmilla inherited her previous bursting energy. Possibly because of the blood she had drained in the blink of an eye.

“New plan: we introduce a new concept for the second book co-written-ish by the Cupcake. Then we demonstrate that the vampire menace can be adorable kitty cats too. Finally, we tell them that all aftershave sucks and is that what’s in my nose?”

Danny laughed.


	77. Chapter 77

Danny had no clue who exactly she would be besting with a claymore, but Kirsch got a dumb idea in his head and traitorous Laura went right along with him while the damn vampire hid her laughter behind a book.

“There’s a dude who’s way up in the military and he was like her first love and I’m concerned, Lawrence!”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with a fucking sword you idiot?”

That’s what Laura’s walked in to see an hour before the wedding. After taking a moment to take in her girlfriend in most of a suit, she noticed the giant sword sitting in the middle of the room. Laura wanted Danny to be wearing a tie at all times, making a promise to herself to get Carmilla on her side of that buttering up.

“Cut the man in half, obviously?” Laura had Kirsch’s back when it annoyed Danny. “I think you’ll be amazing at Best Woman-ing.”

“Hollis?”

“Yes dear?”

“He’s on your third of the room,” Danny pronounced, not completely hearing herself speak. She turned back to the other idiot. “I will stop him if he comes at you. I am not cutting anybody in half because the blood would get on your fiance’s dress and then she’d kill me.”

Laura wanted to be on Kirsch’s side, if only for the entertainment value. “Maybe just whack him with the flat of the blade? That thing’s big enough to cave in a skull or two. And my third of what room?”

Danny opened her mouth to argue with Laura’s assessment of the claymore’s clobbering abilities and found herself unable to speak when her love’s question registered properly in her brain. “A third is probably a bit too small for you. You’ll have more than Carmilla and I put together, obviously.”

Even Kirsch got what Laura was hinting at, a fact that created a fire of concern in his chest. “Have you hit your head, Summer?”

“You’re supposed to hit vengeful suitors with the big sword, not yourself,” Laura added, her heart racing away without her permission. Realistically, she knew Danny was mad to even consider dreaming about that kind of future for them. The part of her mind that wanted a secure forever was so much louder than the rational parts. “And unless you’ve got some weird polytheistic ritual I don’t know about in mind, I don’t think we need to worry about who has the most family and friends in attendance.”

Danny blinked heavily and shook her head. “I don’t. Morticia said there was some vampire thing that’s like, close enough and she’s going to bring it up next week and you have to pretend to be surprised because I was not supposed to tell you and I am going to stop talking now.”

Danny’s face flushed red and she grabbed her finely tailored jacket with one hand and the claymore with the other, striding out of the room as her friend and her girlfriend, fiance, whatever watched.

“Not the worst proposal I’ve ever seen,” Kirsch noted, earning himself a punch in the arm from Laura, even as she grinned.


	78. Chapter 78

He thought their kind was extinct long before the girl in question.

They perpetually failed to restrain themselves, feeding themselves into starvation on secluded islands and continents. The humans would rebuild long after the last of their kind was dead and gone.

How many times was he going to have to collect hundreds of souls whenever the damn vampire’s got hungry?

Oh good Life, he was dealing with the Morgan woman again. Clearly what went wrong last time was her lack of help. Turning this girl into one of them was the obvious course of action, if one were completely out of one’s mind.

The ball, the girl, the grave, the soul.

All fun, all interesting. Moving on, small war starting elsewhere and that was getting more and more interesting as time rolled over the world. He wondered what the humans would come up with over the next few centuries to beat each other to a bloody pulp.

He stopped being fascinated when Nobel got his start. Blowing each other to pieces was worse.

The girl came up again, this time gasping in a state of perpetual drunkenness that walked the line between an unfocused mind and a body overdosing itself to death. None of the vampires of old managed to eat themselves to death. The Morgan woman clearly decided this was some kind of excessive challenge and used the turned help as a test subject.

He was on the battlefield when she survived an age being drowned in Life.

He watched the swathe of destruction Morgan caused. The trail of bodies making a straight line from her to the girl. A warning that she was coming and she was bringing snacks.

Time passed, work got busier on his side and the other. A lot busier.

He started to see more grey in his work.

The girl was going to stop vampires from being idiots and murdering their own food supply faster than it could be replenished.

He watched her jump, he watched the sword go in. He fought for hours with the Morgan woman to collect her, not a sliver of attention to spare for the girl. There was an explosion when he finally won, and then the girl was gone again.

Vampires stopped killing people. They were exposed to the light and driven into charity case status, hunted and dependent on what they could contribute to society to give them a safe meal.

Knowledge is dynamite, or something like that. Languages were never his forte.

The girl called him.

More of a pissed off shout, but he was in a generous mood.

“Give her back,” the girl demanded. He barely noticed the soul she spoke of. The human next to her wasn’t going to live much longer either.

Absolute dynamite corrupts absolutely and the suits had their hands on a key to Life eternal. Just needed the girl for testing.

Brave souls next to her.

He had never given one back before.

The girl died thrice was asking.

His pride said that it was better to be kind twice than to be cheated twice.


	79. Chapter 79

The go in at the shift change in guards. The vault and all of the safety deposit boxes were left unobserved for exactly seven minutes and that was more than enough time to get in, get out, and get angry the next morning.

A Countess should always be personally offended when her bank of choice allows her most precious jewels to go missing.

If said jewels showed up six months later at a Russian diamond dealer, all the worse for the bank.

They knew exactly what the room they would be breaking into looked like, Carmilla had an eye for capturing places she’d been on paper and Laura spent a full week perfecting her 3D renderings of the sketches into something workable.

“I swear if you can’t carry it all after that little display in the gym, I am leaving you and the Cupcake for sane people,” the Countess grumbled as they made their way up through a carefully opened vault door. Her two partners shared a smirk before the Countess was hauled easily over a shoulder with a startled squeak. “Danny!”

Laura threw her head back and laughed, there was no one close to hear them and even if they did, she wasn’t opposed to shooting their way out. “Danny, put her down, we kind of need her.”

Danny soundly ignored them both until Laura had all of their equipment and empty bags safely in the vault with the door that could stop a nuke securely closed behind them. Then she bounced Carmilla a few times before setting her down gently on the marble flooring and dashing out of her grasp when she tried to retaliate.

“Seriously? We are robbing a damn bank and you two are chasing each other like we’re in our fucking hotel room,” Laura hissed, having a very short length of time before she would tire of any shenanigans. Carmilla let herself slide to a halt, crashing into Danny. Danny did not care one bit about Laura’s words and started to kiss Carmilla’s exposed neck mumbling something about seven minutes being more than enough time for the Countess. Carmilla gasped at this assertion and twisted her way out of Danny’s loose grip.

“How dare you!” Carmilla’s shout echoed off the walls, sending them all into silence. “I’ll get started on the boxes.”

“Hollis, the first rule of robbing a bank is to have fun,” Danny got out before dissolving into giggles. “Second rule is to always remove as much of the floor as possible before chipping through what is left on the surface with a sledgehammer.”

Danny finished speaking right around the same time her weapon of choice got to work on their exit strategy. By this time Carmilla had nine of the most worthwhile boxes open and was working on the tenth.

“I do not believe even Carm could get off fast enough for you to still have time to do your damn job,” Laura threw out as she packed the loose money away. The hammering stopped. Laura closed her eyes. “That was not a fucking challenge!”


	80. Chapter 80

Captain Danny Lawrence shot the vaguely male silhouette three times in the head and eight times at centre mass. She reloaded and shot again, just as perfectly as before. If she noticed the dark figure entering the shooting range behind her, she didn’t react.

“Are you required to do that or are you just being all intimidating for little old me?”

In Danny’s opinion, the asshole thief would give herself up the moment any law enforcement got even close. If she didn’t take her amassed wealth and disappear anyway. “Little of both, how long are the cameras out for?”

“That depends on your missus,” came the sultry reply, deft hands closing on either side of Danny’s hips. “Of course, we could leave right now and skip the potential scandal if you’d prefer?”

Danny could hear the asshole smirking, “Kitty, if we get caught, I get you in handcuffs to Houdini yourself out of later. I get a bonus at Christmas, you get to be more of a legend than you already are.”

“Well, there is that one reporter that likes to play up our little rivalry,” Carmilla purred as she reached around to undo Danny’s sensible leather belt. Danny ignored her and resumed her range shooting. “Think she’d question her own marriage to get the exclusive on us?”

“She would not,” Danny’s wife answered, shutting the heavy metal door behind her resolutely. “I will admit the truth before I give a single inch of ground to the idiots who seem to think our marriage is ending tomorrow.”

Carmilla pressed her face into the thin material of Danny’s tight Police branded shirt and groaned. “Can you please let me get into her pants in peace for once?”

“Technically, you’re already there so she’s more than welcome,” Danny rebelled, shifting her hips to remind Carmilla that it was indeed her fingers tortuously lowering the zip on Danny’s pants. “Is the nice man at the desk still alive?”

“He may quit tomorrow but that’s just because of his worrying cocaine addiction,” Laura evaded the actual question like a journalist, annoying the other two to no end. Laura hopped up on the bench and toyed with Danny’s spent casings and daring her wife to continue her practice. “Also, he seems to have the income for a cocaine addiction which makes me think I should have spent more time with him.”

Danny’s gun was down and her body was placed between Laura’s legs before she could finish the thought. “Don’t you dare, we have been planning this for weeks, Laura!”

She closed her eyes and wished they weren’t smirking at each other around her body. Just once, she would like to win against the thief and the journalist. Danny sighed and let herself be manhandled to where they wanted her.

“Big, scary police lady,” Laura placated, really not helping Danny’s ego.

“If you’re real nice, I will tell you how he can afford it?” Carmilla offered. Danny wasn’t listening any longer.

“Shut up, the both of you,” she growled and thanked her lucky stars that no one else would be showing up any time soon.


	81. Chapter 81

Laura’s not sure which reaction she likes less.

Carmilla, ranting against the concept, the book it was based on, and the bullshit movie it spawned.

Danny, frowning at her bruised and bloodied knuckles, her mouth stained red with her own blood, and the rapidly growing bruise on her side.

Herself, urging her to continue down this path, to blow up some buildings and-

Kidding. Totally kidding. Not that it helped her situation any.

“Come on, Tyler, let’s get you to some boxing gloves,” Carmilla began in on Laura once she was done with her anti-Palahniuk speech. Danny grinned brightly from behind her, done with assessing Laura’s wounds. Apparently she was okay enough to suffer on her own. The adrenaline was yet to wear off and Laura was not looking forward to the total lack of sympathy she was facing when it did start hurting.

“Or maybe something in an octagon, that’d sure be entertaining,” Danny added, helping. Not helping Laura, but she was going to side with the damn vampire sooner or later. This was a forgone conclusion. “Do you think you’re going to turn professional?”

They were going to be assholes about this for a while. Potentially forever.

“You both get to fight things all the fucking time,” she growled, surprising herself with how earnestly she felt the anger. “Maybe I want to hit someone for once!”

Laura tugged her jacket on until it covered most of her wounds. She made her peace with losing the shirts she wore to these nights, the exertion kept her warm.

“We have not considered this properly,” Carmilla said to Danny behind her back. Laura stopped walking with a frustrated huff. “Xena?”

There was silence for a moment.

“Xena?” Carmilla repeated, teasing out the word.

“New plan,” Danny’s voice freaking cracked, Laura smirked, “you know that thing we were discussing yesterday, the contingency plan?”

“Race you?”

That was the last thing Laura heard before there was a body behind her and she could taste ashes. The front doors of their apartment was staring her in the face. “This is childish and you both know it.”

“Look, Xena needs a jog to cool off and your hands really, really need cleaning and she backseat first aids.”

Laura let herself in the building, ignoring Carmilla because what the fuck else was she supposed to do?

“You are not licking them clean, I draw the weird line there!” Laura shouted over her shoulder as Carmilla got distracted by what had to be Danny’s breathing under exertion. “Seriously?”

“You spend decades seducing idle intellectual types, see how you deal with this much,” Carmilla paused as Laura let them in the apartment. “This much-!”

“Spectacular life choices? Excellent one-two finish? Willingness to-?” Laura stopped and pointedly ignored the flaring pain in her everything. “It’s the fucking fight-y thing, isn’t it, Countess?”

Carmilla spluttered for a few moments and got distracted by Laura removing her jacket.

“Danny wasn’t able to function when you got all hot and angry!”


	82. Chapter 82

When she got dressed in her cute but sensible clothes that morning, Laura Hollis did not intend to steal nearly a million dollars of cash.

A million dollars in already stolen cash.

And a really nice watch.

And what looked a lot like a grenade.

Laura was just getting out of her fifth session of ‘sit in the coffee shop and pretend to do her research paper while actually staring forlornly at the pretty redhead working at the fire station across the street’ that week when her phone rang suddenly and she had to tear out of the shop with her backpack hastily thrown together. Which she promptly left in between her table and the one next to hers with the nine kinds of hot girl with her nose stuck in something long and Russian, in Russian. Then picked up the other girl’s bag by mistake and was halfway to the bus to the hospital her father was in with a broken arm before she noticed that she’d grabbed the wrong one.

Money, watch, grenade.

Russian mob came to her mind first. Laura discarded that idea because the million dollars in cash apparently had a receipt with it and not even the mob was brazen enough to carry a grenade around.

Laura had a brief but spirited debate about going back or going to the police and decided that giving it back and then calling the cops was her best bet and she might not even get killed in a dark alleyway if she phoned it in anonymously.

The hot Russian girl was waiting outside the cafe with Laura’s bag at her feet and her arms folded as she alternated her attention between the fire station and raising an amused eyebrow over her stupid John Lennon sunglasses at Laura. Should have called the damn police.

Laura approached slowly, like she wasn’t the one technically holding a grenade in the middle of a relatively nice neighbourhood across from the cute firefighter she wished she could ask out. Oh god, the cute firefighter probably didn’t want a girl carrying a grenade or a watch so gaudy.

“That’s mine,” the girl said in what wasn’t a Russian accent but totally sounded like a girl who read Tolstoy in Russian so Laura considered herself ahead on that front.

“The ugly watch?” Laura asked before she could shout some variation of ‘grenade’ at the top of her lungs. She didn’t notice the firefighter getting distracted from her basketball game, nor the slight widening of the not-Russian girl’s eyes.

“And the lighter too,” she replied, covering her shock with a gentle mocking. Laura knew what gun and grenade shaped lighters looked like and it was not the real thing and it was not in the bag. “Do you often go through other people’s things?”

“Uh, no?”

Just once, Laura wished her mouth would do what she wanted.

“Give it back and nothing bad needs to happen to either of us,” she got in response.

Laura fainted just as the damn firefighter arrived with a suspiciously familiar nod of greeting to the not-Russian girl.


	83. Chapter 83

“There’s going to be patrols,” Danny huffed, her laboured breathing the only indication that a wolf had its teeth around her arm. The pain receded into the background, the chill of the wind replacing the heat of the wound. Guard Captain Lawrence wasn’t in the habit of letting a little blood loss getting in her way. Larua wasn’t safe yet and she couldn’t rest until she was. “Their dogs are more than capable and I’ve been leaving one heck of a trail for them to follow.”

Carmilla appeared from her position scouting ahead and stared at her like Danny was suggesting they turn themselves over to Mother dearest.

“Don’t give me that look, you know how good your siblings are,” Danny answered the doubtful look. They weren’t better than the people they were running from. All they had was no one knowing what they were doing and more importantly, why.

The Guard Captain could be dead. Morgan’s favourite daughter could have taken a sick liking to the princess. Laura could have proven herself more resourceful than anyone was expecting and run away all on her own.

Not having a clear motivation to the outside world would be key to how long the three of them survived.

Carmilla flicked her keen dark eyes between them, taking in Danny’s subtle cradling of her arm and Laura’s vaguely hostile glare. “The weather’s going to be too bad for anyone to be out in very soon. After that, they’ll be too busy counting the spoils and identifying the bodies to send out search parties for any of us. Regardless of who won.”

“Morgan won’t know you’re gone?” Laura asked with more compassion, or rather pity, than Danny was expecting from her. “You’re the eldest, the best, right?”

The Guard Captain in her wanted to make whomever was discussing the raiders with the princess stand in the courtyard with their backs perfectly straight for hours on end in the freezing cold and the boiling heat. Then Danny remembered that her guards were all probably dead and getting to the fort was the best chance they had of surviving the night’s weather.

“See the stone pillar over there?” Carmilla got far closer than she needed to be next to Laura to point the marker out. Danny shook her head at the completely subtle woman. “That means we could get back to the fort if we were being chased. Roughly how far superhuman speed in your panic would take you.”

“By that she means five more minutes at most,” Danny simplified, brushing much closer to Laura than strictly necessary but Carmilla was sharing the princess’ air she was that close and Danny’s heart was deciding between left out or jealous. “You’re better at range, check it out while Laura wraps this so I’m not bleeding all over the ground.”

Carmilla’s eyes were drawn to the wound she’d written off at nothing and nodded when Danny’s gloved hand glittered with blood against the fading sunlight.

“What weather?”

Danny and Carmilla shared a glance and said as one, “really big storm.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second last part of the Raiders story in this drabble collection. The rest will be in the second one I'm doing which will all be ~750 words long.


	84. Chapter 84

Carmilla did not know what she was chasing, but she was faster than Xena and her merry idiots so it was her damn job to slow the whatever it was down. She needed to build up some kind of defences against Laura and her, well Carmilla didn’t know if the thing could read minds, so let’s go with Laura’s eyes and pleading little voice.

The shiny creature was going for the river, because it somehow knew Carmilla spent an age on her hair that morning and Laura and Danny barely got to see it before Silas was about to burn down or whatever. This was the origin of her ‘it can read minds’ theory. Other evidence included going after Laura to prompt everyone else into action and running just fast enough to be out of human speeds when Carmilla saw the damn thing do a cheetah impression when it showed up in the first place.

Carmilla wasn’t usually in charge of theories or facts about how large cat running speeds worked. Despite being a large cat. She didn’t sprint often, mostly just being big, lazy, and cuddle-able was enough in her opinion.

The asshole about to ruin her hair stopped to face her. It had black eyes that seemed to absorb light. Carmilla stopped in a shower of dirt, she was wearing a particularly tough pair of hiking boots Danny bought her and she had worn them for the last three weeks straight. Both of the women she slept with protested on the fourth night of wearing them to bed.

“If you could just hang here until my less violent girlfriend comes with her drunk sorority sisters to skewer you or something, I was not listening so don’t bother demanding information from me,” Carmilla absolutely did not whine. Laura never actually carried out her more bloodthirsty nature. Carmilla knew for a fact that Danny most certainly liked it way too much. Carmilla could appreciate a good aesthetic. “Stay!”

The creature was not a mutant seal that responded to canine themed commands.

Carmilla crossed that off the list of possibilities.

“Sit?”

It was not trained.

It could roar plenty loud though, and then decided it needed a swim.

“Oh no! If you make me dive in that fucking river, then I am removing your head from your body and leaving it outside my dorm room on a pike!”

It was open to being trained.

When Danny was done wrangling the drunker girls into a fairly straight line back to base, she was silently preparing herself for Carmilla’s endless complaining for having to hold the beast off for so long.

What she came across after commanding her supposed sisters to sit down before they threw up and continued on by herself was truly terrifying.

When Danny Lawrence considered the ‘can we keep him?’ argument, she was either the one doing the asking or making a show of arguing before eventually giving in to Laura.

Carmilla teaching a mostly aquatic monster to play dead did not bode well for her dog or cat shaped pet ideas.


	85. Chapter 85

Danny came home who knew how long after midnight.

The late night was a one-off and she was refusing to help anyone else move apartments for the rest of her life. She resolved to let Carmilla throw money at the problem next time and every other time after that.

“Hot chocolate?”

Danny smiled as she slipped off her work boots to see Laura tending to a saucepan on the stove. Tomorrow, well today, was Saturday and that meant behaving like teenagers and staying up late only to be reminded that teenage was a while ago and sleep is fantastic enough to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

“Only if you put some liqueur in it too?” The vampire was sure to show up from wherever she was hiding in their hideously new house. Danny trying to get her tongue around French words entertained Carmilla to no end. “I need to get the beer out of my mouth, it’s hurting my taste buds.”

Laura tutted at not only Danny’s idiot work friend for paying her colleague in cheap beer but also at Danny for accepting that kind of trade. “I don’t think she can hear you. Try reading random stuff from the English to French phrasebook.”

“You’re lucky I can do this walking,” Carmilla announced as she appeared from one of the many guest rooms they had converted into increasingly personal workspaces. She held one of her favourite leather jackets and a needle with black thread. Danny and Laura were both transfixed by her precise movements attempting to mend a small tear in one of the pockets.

“Can you play piano, too?” Danny asked, pulling Carmilla to the couch with her. Laura poured out her concoction into two over-sized mugs and took up her place on Carmilla’s other side. Carmilla frowned at a particularly loose piece of fabric, or possibly at Danny.

“I would need some practice before I played anything I don’t already know but yes, I can,” she replied, too distracted to see the lazy grin spreading from Danny to Laura as she caught on to what Danny was getting at.

“So tomorrow night, we should ditch going out for a picnic and maybe break out the poker chips. Unless of course, you know like, other card games, Carm?” Laura earned herself a pointed ‘don’t ruin this’ look over Carmilla’s head. “Because poker is only so entertaining, obviously.”

Carmilla made a noise they had come to associate with a solid ‘yes’ and continued to ignore their stupid smiles.

“How about singing?” Danny pushed their luck, draining her scalding drink to prevent a playful shove. That would be wasting alcohol.

“Yes and if I go outside during the pouring rain, I get deathly ill and die,” Carmilla said while keeping her attention focused on her work. “Anything other stupid questions, assholes?”

Laura got to it faster than Danny, “how many time travellers were there on the Titanic?”

Carmilla put the jacket down, “I will tolerate Austen-related questions, ‘Carmilla is old’ jokes are just annoying. Assholes.”


	86. Chapter 86

Carmilla hated boats of all kinds.

Kidnapping on the boat they were travelling on was not making her opinion brighter at all.

How the hell did they manage to hide someone as tall as Xena anyway?

Laura was off convincing the captain to give control of his vessel to her for emergency purposes. Danny was somehow fucking kidnapped. Carmilla was put on bloodhound duty.

Danny would have a field day with that particular job assignment when she was free again.

The vampire wandered nonchalantly around the mid-sized ship keeping her ears open and her nose tuned into the scent of Christmas and a struggle. Carmilla didn’t see a scenario where Danny could be taken by someone without a fight. What was the point of doing the idiotic white knight routine if she was just going to go down without a fight?

She might admit much later and with much blood and alcohol consumed that worry expressed itself as anger and frustration with Carmilla. It would take much more cajoling to confess actually being worried.

Pine needles freshly fallen cut through the salt of the sea air, sending Carmilla into high alert. It was July so it probably wasn’t a Christmas tree.

The overly beefy man did not expect this tiny, breakable looking woman to tackle him with enough force to dent the metal wall behind him, shattering his ribs. Carmilla would have to be very drunk to admit it, but even the man who reeked of Danny Lawrence knew he had worried the exact wrong person on the ship. The tall woman had a crazy expensive, super high tech watch on and the crew figured someone around her had to have something worth trading for on the ship. Give us your jewels and we let her go. Basic stuff.

As he felt his bones breaking and his blood rushing faster and faster, he wished they’d picked the tiny woman with the dirty blonde hair and the-

No, she was hanging around the secret Hulk woman too.

Carmilla’s closed fist came down and snapped his left femur in two with one blow. The man screamed and wished he were dead. He knew she’d go for the other one, then throw him overboard without a second thought if he didn’t become very useful, very fast.

“There’s a vault in the cargo area, big, strong, and almost uncrackable,” he shouted, wondering when the captain was going to order a security shutdown already. That was the deal and they were paying him handsomely for the immediate containment of any slip-ups the rest of the crew encountered. “Captain has a key, please stop.”

She broke his left femur again, for the hell of it and leapt back from him as a man dressed in a cheap white suit fell from the deck above them.

“Captain?” Carmilla’s captive said before passing out.

“Carm, catch!” Carmilla looked up just in time to catch an overly-complicated key flying at her face. “Is he alive?”

Carmilla rolled her eyes and went to free her girlfriend.


	87. Chapter 87

“I would rather fight the banshee than walk to the nearest other signs of civilisation,” Carmilla stated her position on their predicament clearly and early. She ain’t afraid of no ghost. Long walks with little entertainment, her boots were not made for that kind of walking.

“Violence over bored walking, got it,” Laura replied brightly. “Danny?”

“Yeah?” Danny called back from the trunk of their car, hitting her head when she startled. “Fuck.”

“There’s a banshee in that town and this isn’t exactly private, so you’re going to need to pick another option,” Laura said happily from her perch on the hood of their car. Mostly because it was warm and Carmilla had taken the backseat before they set out and she was only mostly conscious at the moment. “Go fight the thing or walk for help?”

“Why do you think I’m back here?” Danny recovered quickly, pulling back and revealing the enchanted axe they’d packed for, well, for this kind of thing. “Planning some kind of turn as a lumberjack?”

“I am happy to support that plan,” Carmilla threw in, causing both Laura and Danny to wonder what else was in the thermos filled with blood she’d been sipping on since they broke down.

“As am I but I presume you’re on Team Banshee Blasters?”

“No!”

“Not on your life, Hollis,” Danny argued quieter and less tipsily than Carmilla. “Can you walk or do I need to carry you?”

Laura opened her mouth to get stuck in to Danny over the suggestion that she couldn’t get to the overly creepy small town on her own. Then Carmilla sit up so fast she fell out of the car clutching at her stomach. “Oh,” Laura breathed out, annoyed that her breath was visible in the cold of the night. “Maybe we leave her here?”

“Did you accidentally drink mercury again?” Danny asked through giggles. She hung the axe where it belonged on her belt and knelt down to check on Carmilla for anything more serious than drinking too much. “Want to ride on my back?”

Carmilla held out her hand for help up and when she was upright squinted while taking stock of her own equilibrium. “I should be okay, the short, barely there walk will fix the worst of it.”

Laura went through the nine point car safety checklist her father made for her when she got her license before they set off for the dark and dreary town with a graveyard ever-filling with fresh graves. She patiently waited for either of her companions to remember that a banshee generally meant there was another, mass-killing force present.

“Are you sure this is where you heard it?” Laura checked when they reached the graveyard to find no young maidens wailing over the freshly dead. “Seems pretty dead.”

Before she could be broken up with on the spot, a high-pitched scream sent Carmilla to the ground clutching her ears while Danny and Laura winced at the noise.

“Seems pretty deader.”

Carmilla wished she’d picked the long walk.


	88. Chapter 88

Carmilla was sure either Danny or Laura planned this entire weekend to make cat jokes.

Danny had to be off in the woods either finding suitable firewood or attempting to get herself killed via bear. Laura sat leaning against Carmilla’s side with a book propped open on her lap and one hand in her hair showing that she was entranced in the story to a degree that Carmilla could exploit.

If Carmilla ever managed to actually catch a fish, Larua was going to be more shocked than the fish as it came flying out of the water. Keeping one ear open for the bears and other wildlife, she resettled herself and checked that Laura was okay.

Could exploit. Wasn’t going to, no need to annoy either of them when they were spending the night out here. Pissed off Laura led to concerned Danny and freezing cold Carmilla. That was not an ideal situation.

“What do we do if there’s a fish?” Carmilla vocalised the first thing that popped into her head when she felt something that might be a tug on her pole. “’Cause I’m thinking throw the fishing rod and running away.”

Laura hummed in a placating manner, then actually heard what Carmilla said. “No clue, not that though.”

“Excellent.”

Carmilla wondered what the storm clouds in the distance did for fishing. Good or bad?

“Catch anything?” Danny arrived back at their half-assed camp with a bundle of wood in her arms and no bear pelt wrapped around her shoulders. “We should head back sooner rather than later.”

“Laura?”

“Yes?” Laura still didn’t look up from her book.

“Storms are bad for fish,” Carmilla concluded, proud of herself despite Danny rolling her eyes as she went to drop her collection in the back of the borrowed truck. “Not sure if catching them will make a difference regarding the storm.”

“You don’t bring home food to make up for our terrible hunting skills and you can’t catch fish. Worst cat ever,” Danny threw back. Laura finally looked up from her book.

“Bad cat? What?” Laura tucked her bookmark into her page and hauled herself up to blink at the sunlight. “Why are we leaving?”

Carmilla reeled her line in and stood up. She grabbed Laura’s shoulder and turned her until she could see the black storm front moving towards them. “We’re worried about sunburn, sugar.”

“It’s a good book!” Laura tried to defend herself. “Do we have to go back?”

Danny wordlessly stared at the approaching clouds then at Laura.

“Good point, is the giant spouts of water part of regular storm behaviour?”

Carmilla and Danny both turned in sync, causing Laura to smile despite the glowing whatever that was appearing in the middle of the spouts of water. She liked it when they got along.

“Can we please go somewhere and not need to fight some whatever the fuck that thing is?”

“Xena, we can leave at any time if you and Laura agree that people other than you are more qualified to deal with the-”

“Okay, that’s a head and we are leaving.”


	89. Chapter 89

Danny did all of the driving. It wasn’t a conscious decision they made, it was just how things worked out. She didn’t really have a taste for alcohol and Laura refused to drive their car due to how far forward she had to adjust the driver’s seat.

This meant Danny was entering her fifth year of accidental sobriety, another day and it would be five years to the day. Carmilla was the only one who noticed. Laura barely drank as it was and Carmilla only had the odd dash of vodka in her blood. Without the sorority atmosphere, Danny didn’t even think twice about getting the non-alcoholic selections when they went out.

When they moved into a house that they owned, like without rent or anything, it called for a ludicrously expensive bottle of bourbon. Because it was the only stronger drink that Danny could stomach anymore and Laura refused to have a totally sensible expenditure of money twice in one week.

“How exactly do we plan on going to sign the paperwork tomorrow?” Danny slurred, amusing herself to no end with tossing the empty bottle back and forth between her hands, flipping it each time. “It’s a really long walk and I am not going to be okay before noon.”

Danny was a sober drunk. For the first few hours at least.

“I will go and do it,” Carmilla shouted from their kitchen. Probably messing with the settings on the fridge again.

Danny chose that moment to trip over nothing, dropped the bottle, and tumbled onto their newly bought couch, crushing Laura.

“Dear fucking god, Danny!” Laura screamed out of shock. She was too far gone for it to actually hurt. Carmilla was in the room immediately and added her own body to the pile in an equally drunk nosedive. “Carm!”

“It was an accident!” Carmilla shouted right back at Laura. “Five years until you have another drink, asshole.”

Carmilla rolled off the pile onto the floor, Danny did not.

“Danny Lawrence if you pass out on top of me, I will,” Laura paused to think, “I will do something that you will not like.”

“Real threatening there, Cupcake,” Carmilla added from the floor.

“But you’re warm and super cuddle-able,” Danny whined. She did not move. Carmilla made her peace with dragging them both out of bed in the morning and admitting that she could actually drive a car. “Carmilla?”

Danny was the best kind of drunk and Carmilla sincerely missed her sometimes.

“Yes darling?”

“Come back please.”

“You know, the real estate place is open normal weekday hours,” Carmilla pitched her cunning plan. “We sleep right here and try for being adults sometime after lunch.”

Danny hummed her agreement and Laura wiggled around until Danny was no longer crushing her.

“I agree,” Danny mumbled into Laura’s hair, reaching out blindly for Carmilla.

“I think we should start somewhere lighter if you’re going to take drinking back up,” Laura’s muffled voice declared with a groan.

Carmilla would sign the papers.


	90. Chapter 90

“The what?” Laura had no clue how they knew there was a storm coming. Was it part of Guard Captain and baby raider training? Why wasn’t it part of her own education?

“Storm, princess. Does the castle not educate its youth?” Carmilla, Lilita Morgan’s best and eldest adopted child, called over her shoulder. Her deadly knives strapped to her thighs while her bow was drawn in preparation for another wolf attack or either side in the battle they left behind coming searching for them. They would all be missed by the time the storm calmed.

Guard Captain Danny Lawrence flexed her hands, working through the pain after her brush with a wolf and its jaw. “The fort’s right there so you don’t need to worry about your courtly education just yet. Next storm, promise.”

Princess Laura felt dumb and inexperienced. Though she knew she had a sheltered life behind her, Laura was tiny compared to the two warriors.

The fort was barely a fort. It was a glorified abandoned barracks with a half-hearted wall around it.

But it was a solid building and they only needed four strong walls to wait out the storm.

Danny leveraged her heavy sword on the lock, popping the door open easily.

“Ladies,” she said with a quasi-serious bow. Laura’s heart lurched as always when her Guard Captain was around. Carmilla reached up on her toes to kiss Danny on the cheek on her way through, crushing whatever joy Laura might have felt. “There’s supplies underneath the officer’s bed, warmer clothes in the wardrobe, and camping gear is over there.”

Danny disappeared deeper into the fort while Carmilla set about getting the fireplace going.

“How long have you both been planning this?” Laura asked the raider she had been left alone with for the first time. Life seemed more dangerous without Danny around. “You have supplies and a plan and who knows what else!”

“A few months, since Mother told us where we were going next,” Carmilla answered without fully paying attention to the princess. “The plan extends far enough away to meet up with your father’s full forces to take back the castle and the kingdom from Mother.”

“Danny is the most attentive person I know, how the hell did she have time for this?” Laura was not jealous. Not even remotely. “And how did she meet you?”

Carmilla was silent for enough time that Laura heard Danny messing around in the kitchen, probably with those supplies.

“Well?”

Carmilla got the fire going and turned, stood up, and levelled Laura with a considering look.

“She was close to you, in a position of power, with freedoms a regular guard didn’t have-”

“Bullshit,” Laura called, getting to know the raider’s liar voice well. Being raised for diplomacy counted in very few situations, this was one of them.

“That’s part of it, I wasn’t going to ally myself with some guard.”

“She’s my ‘some guard’.”

“Oh, I noticed, Princess. Nine kinds of hot and just our type.”


	91. Chapter 91

The weird and wonderful world of Silas University left its graduates with habits that stuck out in major ways.

“You have no idea where we are,” Laura crowed happily from the backseat. Danny somehow managed to sleep through the overly joyful noise. Carmilla sighed with the weight of three hundred years and wished she’d spent more of it getting to know spiderweb roads that stretched across Europe rather than being whisked away by Mother in lavish cars and trains and planes.

All that was left was to stop Laura before she could start in on the impressions.

Carmilla hated the impressions.

“There’s a rest stop like three miles up the road, please keep your comments and mocking to yourself until I have had caffeine,” Carmilla threatened vaguely. All the energy went out of Laura’s joy. “And you’re waking Stretch because neither of us speak this stupid fucking language.”

In the car Carmilla was an unhappy Carmilla. Doing the driving herself only made the situation worse.

“But Laura, all language is beautiful and we should treasure it forever and they’re disappearing so fast-”

“Danny!”

Carmilla didn’t know why she thought that would go remotely well. Screaming in general was a massive no-no in their house and doing it in an enclosed space was begging for retribution. The impressions made her do it, she would later swear.

Danny had the knife she carried in her boot out and ready to kill a nanosecond faster than Carmilla’s hand came down to grab her wrist. End result, Carmilla’s hand sliced open and the car very briefly off the road.

“Holy shit,” Danny breathed after dropping the blade at her feet and blinking away whatever sleep remained after her sudden adrenaline hit. “Are you okay?”

Danny recovered annoyingly well from shock.

“I’ll be fine, we need to pull over anyway,” Carmilla tried to reassure her, even as her hand shook violently without her permission. “Then one of you is driving.”

“Really?” Laura was being a pain today, Carmilla thought. Probably because she was made to drive all day yesterday.

“I’ll go in, and drive when I’m done,” Danny declared. Carmilla found a suitable place and parked. “Where are we and what language am I speaking?”

“Not one word, Hollis,” Carmilla growled and told Danny what she needed to know.

Danny walked into the store like she did any other back at Silas. Knives hidden in each boot, stun gun holstered behind her, sword reflexively at her hip.

The gentleman behind the counter, just doing his job, took one look at the towering, highly armed woman, and the clear getaway car out front and oh lord, was that blood on her?

He started emptying the register, taking care to leave the notes in easy to steal stacks. He had been robbed before and it was by giant foreigners that time too!

“No, I’m not-”

He didn’t hear whatever she said next. One of her compatriots came flying out of the car with blood streaming down her arm.

Give her the money and go, and he might just live.


	92. Chapter 92

Danny studied the playing card with such intensity that Laura was starting to worry about the thing catching fire.

Carmilla wanted to know if the frat boy was jealous Danny was feuding with another organisation at Silas. The sudden laser focus on the Alchemy Club was sure to be breaking his idiot heart right now. Carmilla didn’t find it within herself to care.

Danny resigned herself to the confusion with a sigh. “Don’t you have most of a code breaking degree?”

Carmilla looked up from her detailed sketch of Danny’s jawline to meet her eyes. “If I say yes, are you going to ask me about the stupid card the stupid nerds gave you?”

“You’re a stupid nerd,” Laura interjected, like this was news. She was soundly ignored.

“Yes, and you’re going to figure it out because it could take me hours and hours of time that could be better spent doing anything or anyone else,” Danny outlined her clear bribery scheme.

Laura snorted she laughed so hard. “Get going so she can be done with them and back here doing us,” she added, helpfully.

“It’s literally noon, was there something in your breakfasts?” Carmilla recoiled at the sudden two-person lazy propositions. “It smells like a distillery so I’m going to go with ‘they’re making booze’ and the card’s for the red rose garden outside the Pollock Building. There’s a hatch to what was an underground ammunition supply station, is now being used for shitty probably magical alcohol.”

Carmilla did not mention that she knew damn well that was down there and it was a miracle no one else had noticed the odour coming from that garden. The roses did not smell that strong.

Danny nodded once, picked up her axe, and went off to play prohibition agent for the afternoon.

Laura and Carmilla were left in silence, both wondering if they should follow so Danny didn’t get carried away and the Pollock Building ended up exploded. They mutually decided to go about their business unless things started literally blowing up. Laura kept watching some political debate Carmilla couldn’t care less about. Carmilla swapped subject and began a new page drawing Laura.

“It’s probably super hot down there,” Laura started nearly twenty minutes later. Carmilla put down her art supplies with some force. “All that exercise, the blood pumping super hard.”

“Do you need a cold shower?” Carmilla burst out when Laura set her with her version of seduction eyes. It worked better on Carmilla than giving hers did on anyone else. “Because I will throw you in a cold shower if I have to.”

Laura put her headphones down and turned to set her with a glare, “Danny won’t threaten to throw me places.”

Carmilla rolled her eyes and they ignored each other until Danny collapsed through the door three hours later.

“Okay,” Danny began while lying on the floor, “they’re recruiting freshmen to make bourbon for them. The building still stands, but there’s now a pure alcohol fountain ruining the roses.”

“You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

“Shut up, vampire lady.”


	93. Chapter 93

Installing a security camera was technically part of Carmilla’s rights at the owner of the building. If there was an all-female fight club in the basement she randomly placed a camera, then how was she to know?

Laura won the spirited discussion after her two girlfriends’ found out she was doing bare-knuckle fights once a week. Since then, they reserved the right to worry and coo over her bruised knuckles and battered skin. Laura suddenly understood what drove her nuts over Danny. The exhilaration and the danger got her blood going and made her ravenous for her lovers as soon as she was done.

Her body flew back into the circle of women, many hands reaching forward to help her back into the mock ring that was really a hastily drawn chalk circle on the ground. It was half scuffed away already and the night had barely begun.

The little finger knuckle on her right hand was split open and bleeding, a fact Laura recognised with a mad satisfaction. The girl whose name she didn’t know was bleeding from her left eyebrow and her nose. Laura was totally winning. This girl was going to submit.

Laura forgot every piece of training that said to cover herself. Lunging inside her opponent’s reach, she clenched her fist and swung it upward into he bottom of the other woman’s jaw. The opponent collapsed backward, landing unconscious with a thump against the cold hard ground.

“We should not be watching this,” Danny stated without taking her eyes off the screen nor making any moves to shut off the live feed to the security camera. “We’re going to be excited when she gets home and Laura always notices when we’re worked up.”

Carmilla barely heard her, Laura was squaring up against a new opponent. A first-timer, Laura always got the newbies.

Danny frowned. “Is she going to start making bombs or turning those girls into a cult?”

“Why would she need them to go fight for her when we both exist?”

“Are we going to be making bombs or spouting crappy philosophical bullshit? I am not okay with that,” Danny said while blinking painfully. Screens for long periods of time did not agree with her one bit.

“She blew a kiss to the camera when she walked down the stairs, Lawrence, keep it together and we can act all concerned for whomever is spying on her and her circle of gorgeousness.”

“Of all things,” Danny huffed under her breath, not allowing the quick stab of jealously to show. “She’s staring at us.”

“We are a very attractive camera,” Carmilla replied.

“Did you let Perry bedazzle it again?” Danny knew the answer, and was sworn to secrecy regarding Laura.

“’Let’ is a very generous word there,” Carmilla mumbled, then she winced. “Less staring, more punching, Cupcake!”

Danny tore her eyes away from the screen as Laura swung in the right place and hurt the other girl’s kidney. “Remind me to take you to the Summer Society roller derby team practice sometime.”


	94. Chapter 94

“She has a sword, you idiot.”

“The male ones all had swords too, and look what they did with them!”

Laura wished she were dead. That the ocean had failed to consume her was a mystery in her first few moment back in the land of the living. If she was already dead, then she wanted to register her disagreement with the afterlife filled with random women talking over her body and questioning her armaments. The sword was part of the uniform, every explorer knew that.

“The male ones weren’t cute and they did not try to play dead like she’s doing,” came the first voice again, dark and roughened with age or alcohol. Laura spared a guess at which and refused to open her eyes. She wasn’t playing dead, just wishfully hoping that the gods might smile on her for once. “The boat went down like a child was navigating, perhaps this is the child.”

“She is certainly small enough,” came the second voice, lighter and worried at the same time. “Hey, kid, you okay?”

Laura bristled at being called a ‘kid’ by anyone, even strange women on a strange shore with even stranger accents. Laura’s father made sure she travelled far and wide in her youth and the accent wasn’t one she had come across before. Maybe she did find new land. One filled with women who couldn’t identify a grown adult when they saw one.

Her eyes opened, squinting against the harsh sunlight and the salty burning in her eyes. Breathing hurt, deep in her lungs and all through her throat. “Fuck off,” she snarled at the lighter voice, noting that the redder human-shaped blob recoiled. She was big, real big, and Laura let her have the ‘small enough’ comment. Giants had to look small to the woman.

“Next time, we take the sword off the stranger,” dark voice chimed in.

Laura burst to her feet, drawing her sword on the two women in three clumsy motions. The sword was part of the uniform, knowing how to use it was optional. “Where am I?”

The shorter one stared at her like she was an alien. “Where were you trying to be?”

“Anywhere not already on the map,” Laura replied while taking a step back and raising her sword to the tall ginger who was trying to get around the blade’s reach. “Exploring, requires a sword.”

“Why?”

Laura had no idea.

“To fight the locals when they insult her stature, obviously,” the dark one answered for her. “Danny, put the knife down.”

The tall one, Danny, tucked the small blade back into its sheathe, keeping her eyes trained on the sword.

“It’s mostly for hunting and heavy woodcutting, pretty sure it’s blunt,” Laura admitted, letting the blade fall into the sand. “Please tell me you aren’t cannibals or something similarly terrifying.”

“One ‘eat you’ joke and I am walking my way back home over the ocean if I have to,” Danny cut in before the other woman could speak.

“No fun.”


	95. Chapter 95

Mother never said that every Vault was bound to be protected by something big and scary. In retrospect, Carmilla should have know opening a Vault was just begging for a fight.

The fact that their little team of three started out the day they were mounting their final assault with exactly none of them dressed in the same clothes they went to sleep in.

“When I said, ‘let’s make camp here and try for the Vault in the morning’, I was kidding,” the Conscript with the aerial drone, Danny, began Carmilla’s day off with a headache. She did not need anyone happy with mornings in her morning. “Now there’s a giant-ass snake thing and what the fuck am I supposed to do with a gun I can’t carry enough bullets to reload?”

“I killed like four hundred super-mega-ultimate varkid fuckers for that!” Laura, the Bullzerker, retorted. The noise attracted unwanted, thresher attention. “You’re killing them.”

Danny rolled her eyes and hoped Carmilla’s Vladof mod would cover the sudden loss of all her rifle ammo.

The threshers came at her all from the same direction. Laura was never picking their campsite ever again. Danny levelled the Chopper and let it free.

A fuck-ton of bullets ensued.

Technical Vault Hunter term, fuck-ton.

The Chopper kept going and going until the threshers were dead and Danny decided to use the last two hundred or so bullets to write her name in the mountain behind their bodies.

“Overkill, darlings, it’s a thing,” Carmilla purred, crawling her way somehow attractively out of their tent. “Shall we kill their god or mother ship or whatever?”

“It might not be a giant, really scary thresher waiting for us,” Laura crowed optimistically, stretching her arms in preparation of a hard day barrelling through the hoards of Pandora’s monsters. “It could be a dragon or a tentacle monster.”

“And we don’t have such beautiful toys as you,” Carmilla chimed in, fixing her wide supply of Jakobs gear. Whatever came at her was dead, fast. She donned her hat and threw their surplus gear into the back of the technical. “What do we do with the loot?”

“Sell it, send Marcus out of business, retire to an oasis moon to grow old together,” Laura answered without hesitation, blushing. They both stared at her, slack-jawed.

“Or come away with nothing,” Danny added, being the realist (pessimist) of their little group. “That’s always an option when it comes to Vaults.”

“That thing is worth millions,” Carmilla argued right back, she’d asked Marcus what he’d pay for the eternally rare Chopper. He offered Carmilla double what he bought Roland’s older model for. “We’ll be fine.”

They set off, no one having more to say.

“Think it’ll be as scary as Handsome Jack?” Laura broke their silence on the way to the Vault. “I heard he took hours for Maya and her crew to take out.”

Carmilla rolled her eyes, Siren solidarity was worth it sometimes. “Please, he died mid-sentence after his Warrior died.”


	96. Chapter 96

The visiting prince went sailing down the stairs, landing with a crunch at Laura’s feet.

“That’s another no then?” Laura shouted up the staircase that would need to be cleaned of blood yet again. Witch woman was not going to be happy at another supposed perfect suitor turned down by their princess. “There’s a perfectly good window you can throw them out!”

Heavy footfalls thundered down the stone steps, sturdy boots coming into Laura’s view. They slipped on the blood splatter and the princess tumbled down to land next to her wayward prince.

Laura folded her arms and stared down at her with an eyebrow raised. The princess poked the dude to make sure he was dead and grinned madly up at her ‘ambassador’.

Her stupid mouth opened like she was going to defend herself. Laura beat her to it.

“I swear to fucking god, if you’re just going to keep killing them, why the fuck do you send me off to fucking find them for you?” Laura shouted, attracting the attention of the closest person to them. Oh fantastic, the witch was on her way. “Why, Danny, why?”

Danny silently got to her feet and surged to Laura. Strong hands wrapped around the backs of her thighs and Laura was pressed against the cold wall by a hot body. Danny’s lips and teeth were at her neck insistently. Laura’s head fell back and lolled to the side as the witch came into the ‘Dead Prince Landing’.

“Murder is not an aphrodisiac, darlings,” Carmilla interrupted, leaned against the closed door seductively with her barely there draped strips of clothing. After a brief moment of indecision, she decided that watching would be preferable today. “Be quick about it, I’m not working if the place smells like corpse again.”

Larua glared for a playful moment before Danny moved her hands and Laura was distracted with burying her hands in long red hair, pulling for dear life.

“We are going to be at war with these people,” Carmilla decided to commentate to amuse herself. “Sooner or later someone is going to question all the ‘accidents’ their prince’s have on the road home.”

Danny paused her assault, eliciting a whine from Laura. “This one didn’t make it here, easy,” she threw out before getting back to work.

“Four ‘accidents’, six ‘died in a duel for your honour’, now two whole ‘did not showed up at all’,” Carmilla argued with no malice behind the words. “We need a moat so we can add drowning to the list for some variety.”

Danny’s sheathed sword came flying at her, quickly followed by her leather vest and pristine white shirt. Carmilla juggled them around until giving up and pouting with force and quivering lips. Neither of her lovers’ noticed, not even when the sword clattered to the floor.

“Anything else? Dispose of the body for you? Launder your clothing?” Carmilla didn’t really do speculating well. Laura cracked first.

“Either go dig a moat or help me with the blood lust please!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I was in a weird mood okay?


	97. Chapter 97

“Nathaniel!”

Danny woke to a shout and a crash.

Becoming foster parents wasn’t the most peaceful thing the three of them had ever done. It certainly increased their glass replacement needs exponentially with each and every not-so-normal kid Carmilla and Laura found and kept like stray animals. Danny shook herself away from calling the kids that, even though Nate had apparently flown into a window.

Again.

Danny tried to get out of bed, but there was a greyhound sleeping over her legs, rendering them useless.

“Get down from there!”

Danny was infinitely grateful that the shape-shifting kids were Carmilla’s responsibility while they weren’t especially human looking.

Like their newest addition, the incredible hawk boy with a laser guided focus on any and all breakable windows. Carmilla sounded like she was three more shattered panes of glass from angrily turning into a panther and chasing him around for the rest of the morning. With intent to force lawn mowing duties.

“Lindsey, sweetie?” Danny mumbled, poking the greyhound in the shoulder. “Kid, you gotta wake up.”

There was a scraping of claws against their hardwood flooring, followed by a series of thumps and a yowl. The kittens were coming.

“Lindsey, get up now or be aggressively cuddled by the wonder twins,” Danny tried through her fuzzy just-woke-up haze. The greyhound still didn’t stir. “Alright, I tried.”

Two flashes of sleek sand-coloured fur crashed through the master bedroom’s door and leapt onto the bed. One of them flipped over Lindsey’s sleeping body while the other went sailing into the wall behind the bed.

“Good morning, the ice-packs are in the chest freezer, and you’ve got three seconds before she’s up and barking,” Danny informed the lion twins, causing a mad scramble for the lightly broken door that resulted in yet more holes in the bedding and a single bleeding scratch above Lindsey’s hips.

Danny surged forward and grabbed Lindsey by the shoulders as she shifted back into human form. The muscles shifted and the nine year old wriggled wildly to escape and have her revenge.

Children demanding to be allowed to seek revenge was an unfortunate by-product of raising kids with Laura and Carmilla.

“No murdering before lunch,” Danny shouted while Lindsey elbowed her in the side of the head. “Stop it, settle!”

Lindsey stilled, panting and growling at the broken door. Danny sighed, they needed to start either getting stronger or cheaper doors.

Metal maybe.

“Are we done trying to chase the kitties?” Danny asked, hugging her foster child close until she calmed down fully. “They’ve hurt themselves, if that helps?”

Lindsey turned to glare up at her, pouting. “Please?”

“No, no murder today,” Danny cuddled her closer. “Today is a non-murder day, I don’t make the rules.”

“But they started it!”

“When has that ever worked!”

Danny rolled her eyes and lifted Lindsey into the air, making for the door while the kid squealed.

“They started it, so we have to throw them in the pool in retribution,” Danny declared quietly, deciding Laura was going to be the mature one today.


	98. Chapter 98

Laura took her third tequila shot of the night, slamming down the empty glass next to Danny’s still-full three.

“Drink up Lawrence or you know damn well what is going to happen to you,” Laura couldn’t help but taunt. “Do you really want to give Carmilla and I that much power?”

Danny actually whimpered. “But it tastes so bad!” Danny whined too.

Carmilla was off not having any clue about whom she would get to play with that night, as per the rules. Previous loser was not in the running to lose consecutively. Laura was looking to extend her seven month winning streak while Danny spent any non-Laura time with Carmilla planning. Plotting.

Laura did not want to know what they had planned, expect that she kind of did.

“You won’t have to taste anything else tonight if I win again, Carm and I have so many ideas,” Laura teased, picking up her next shot glass with deliberately extended fingers. Danny glared as Laura downed the alcohol quickly. “Unless, that’s what you want?”

Danny took in a deep breath and grabbed her empty beer glass. Laura watched with interest while Danny dumped all five of her shots in the glass and took full advantage of Laura’s stunned silence to swallow the entirety of the tequila in three mouthfuls.

The beer glass slammed down onto the table so hard it cracked.

Danny’s smug grin didn’t fade as she reached out and took Laura’s fifth shot as well.

“Fuck.” Laura’s cool faltered.

Danny smirked. “If you are real good, I might consider it.”

“You hate tequila!” Laura had to fight, she really did. The argumentative nature never went away, even with age. “Carm hates tequila. That’s why I picked it!”

Danny raised her eyebrows at the admission.

“Fuck,” Laura repeated. “Fine, I rigged it, happy?”

Her girlfriend leaned back all smug and crap.

“Oh? Are we admitting that now?” Danny teased. Laura caught the bartenders attention and motioned for more beer. “I certainly haven’t spent the last month learning to love this one brand of tequila while Carmilla and I were off ‘studying the architecture’ across campus.”

Laura frowned. “That is not what I was expecting ‘studying the architecture’ to be code for.”

“First order of business,” Laura braced at Danny’s smug-ass smirk, “not another word.”

Their new beers arrived just in time for Carmilla to steal Laura’s. She went to argue, but was halted by a raised eyebrow and a matching second smirk.

“Aw thanks, Cupcake,” Carmilla moved to drape herself over Danny’s back. “By the silence, I presume we’ve won?”

Danny made quick work of her beer and glared at Carmilla until she did the same.

“Second order of business-”

“Enjoying it too much,” Carmilla cut in.

“Fine, finish your beer so we can get her home before she passes out from losing for once.”

Laura went bright red and fumed silently.

“We’ll be nice, promise,” Danny taunted.

“We will not, tequila is disgusting and you need to be punished.”


	99. Chapter 99

Carmilla was bouncing with excitement for something that wasn’t sex. Laura was concerned and Danny wished she hadn’t agreed to this.

“You hate shopping!” Danny yelled, tugging on her plain white tank top as she tiptoed around the assorted mess in their off-campus apartment. “Stop with the happy and let’s get this over with already.”

Like a bolt of lightning, Laura figured out why the vampire was so happy with herself.

“Please remember that there will be other people at the party, not just the three of us and that you get all pout-tastic when other people stare at Danny,” she reminded Carmilla gently. Firmly would come later. After Carmilla intimidated half the party-goers for appreciating whatever skimpy, tight-fitting Halloween costume Danny ended up wearing. Then there would be frowning and maybe some strong ropes.

“Don’t worry, kitten, no one else will like it much,” was what she got in response. Danny’s mood went from sour to worried and Laura didn’t see either of them again until the party.

Laura saw Carmilla, but no Danny.

Carmilla, who was dressed up like Indiana Jones, led Laura to believe that her other girlfriend would eventually show up as Lara Croft or possibly Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft.

Gritty reboot Lara Croft, even better.

Honestly, Laura did not get the joke immediately.

Danny wasn’t actually wearing anything out of the ordinary. Discounting the gun on her hip, Laura couldn’t see what Carmilla could have possibly been so excited by. The vest was nice and the pants were super tight, nothing to get overly excited about.

“You should have let me dye your hair,” Carmilla complained while Danny rolled her eyes and ignored her.

“I don’t get it,” Laura whispered as Danny wandered off to find something to drink. Carmilla looked at her like she was an idiot. “What?”

“You cried for like a week after we saw the stupid movie,” Carmilla huffed. “The old dude died, it was not that sad.”

Laura slapped Carmilla’s shoulder because how dare she suggest that Han Solo dying wasn’t devastating. Carmilla just didn’t understand really getting into a story, loving the characters, and feeling real things when they died. Who cares how obvious the twist was going in?

“It was absolutely that sad, you heartless monster,” Laura argued. Carmilla smirked and kissed her girlfriend to make the frown go away.

Danny came back with something non-alcoholic in her hand and the urge to hug her day shopping away. Laura squirmed around as Danny’s ice cold drink brushed against her stomach and the gun dug into her hip.

“I say we make her keep the hat,” Danny grumbled with her head laying on top of Laura’s. “Or next year we have to do Depp.”

“What?” Laura turned in Danny’s arms to glare properly. “Who are we doing-?”

Danny smirked, waiting.

“Why do we bring her places?”

Danny shrugged. “She’s real observant half the time?”

“This is very sweet and you both suck so hard.”


	100. Chapter 100

Carmilla’s hooded leather jacket kept out most of the rain and made her a complete non-person to the general public. Every now and then she purposefully smashed her shoulder into the people passing her by, feeling around in their pockets for weighty wallets to lift.

A girl had to make a living somehow.

Seven likely targets and three bulging leather wallets later, Carmilla ducked into her current rental apartment under yet another fake name. The sparse furniture creaked when she collapsed into her solitary chair at her tiny kitchen table with her haul spread out before her.

The first wallet was packed with bank notes with value in the thousands. The second held only a business card with ‘L. Hollis’ written on it followed by a string of numbers Carmilla couldn’t make sense of at all.

The third contained ninety-three pieces of paper shoved into it with ‘IDIOT’ written on each and every one of them.

“What the almighty fuck?” Carmilla asked the empty apartment as her door flew open and scared the hell out of her. “Fuck!”

“Don’t you ‘fuck’ me you stealing fucking idiot ‘IDIOT’ asshole!”

Carmilla blinked twice and smirked at the diminutive woman standing pissed off in her doorway. “I could buy you a drink first if you’d prefer?”

The woman stared at her in disbelief. “Are you fucking kidding me? C. Karnstein?”

Carmilla wanted to lunge for the gun she kept in the fridge, but stopped herself at her name. The real one, the one that wasn’t on any of her anything.

“How do you know my name?”

The woman wasn’t listening, instead she was staring at the pile of ‘IDIOT’ papers and the card that belonged to-

“L. Hollis?”

“It’s Laura, actually,” she replied, distantly like she was a million miles away. “What’s the ‘C’ stand for?”

“Carmilla,” she answered without thinking.

“Seriously? Five damn seconds?”

Carmilla actually did go for her gun at the same time as Laura pulled out a set of brass knuckles with a knife sticking out of the end. They turned as one to see an extremely tall woman dressed in a crisp pair of black slacks and a finely tailored vest that Carmilla knew was hiding a full set of throwing knives. The bright red hair and her muscled arms caused Carmilla to stop all movement and stare.

“Five fucking seconds and you’re both compromised, are you kidding me?”

The lady had really pretty eyes.

“Did you have the world’s best one night stand last night, Karnstein?” Laura huffed in annoyance or frustration. The unidentified woman rolled her eyes.

“No, she has no game as far as I can tell,” the asshole woman answered before Carmilla’s words worked again. “However, I do have a proposition for both of-”

“Yes,” Laura blurted out at the same time Carmilla started nodding along with her. “Whatever it is yes.”

“What she said,” Carmilla agreed eagerly.

The woman sighed and considered her life choices before laying it out straight:

“You two idiots wanna rob a train?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are, the end.
> 
> To recap: yes, I can totally write a 500 word drabble on top of the 750 words I put into longer fics each day.
> 
> I'm taking a couple of weeks to not write anything. Then back to it.


End file.
